What is 15 and five eighths plus 10 and five sixths?

Answer 1

In order to add fractions with unlike denominators (the bottom number of a fraction) we must find a common denominator.

We find common denominators by finding the lowest common denominator. In our case we're looking for something in common for 8 and 6.

8| 8, 16, 24, 32, 40

6| 6, 12, 18, 24, 30

So 24 would be our lowest common denominator (LCD). Now we need to turn our fraction, not the whole numbers, into common denominators.

5/8 (3) and 5/6 (4) comes to 15/24 and 20/24 respectively.

Now we can add back our whole numbers 15 15/24 and 10 20/24. Now we can add.

15 15/24 + 10 20/24 = 25 35/24. Do you see something wrong with the fraction we've resulted in? It's an improper fraction. We need to make this bad boy a proper fraction for our problem to be mathematically correct.

Remember when turning improper fractions to proper fractions we need to get the numerator lower than the denominator. We just simply figure out how many times the numerator could fit in the denominator.

35 can fit into 24, one time. We we now have to add a whole number and subtract 24 from our fraction.

25 + 1 and 35-24/24 results in 26 11/24. So our final result, which is now a proper fraction (mixed number) and is a simplified fraction is:

15 5/8 + 10 5/6 = 26 11/24.