Solving Problems with Rational Numbers, a la Shmoop. Rational numbers make Trevor feel…irrational. He’s okay with the integer kind…they’re straightforward enough… [Trevor stood in a busy mall] …but fractions give him fits. Like…literal fits. You can’t take him anywhere. [Trevor having a seizure in a mall] His mother, wanting the best for her son, takes every opportunity to turn real-life situations into word problems she can use to challenge Trevor so that, hopefully, he’ll get over his fear. [Trevor and his Mum in a car] It might work, but if not, he’s going to have a loooot to talk about in therapy. Just yesterday, Trevor’s mother said to him: “Honey, there are 9 grocery bags in the van. Each is capable of holding 16 groceries, [Trevor's Mum giving Trevor a problem to solve] but 5 of them are half full, 3 of them are three-quarters full, and 1 of them is a quarter full. Could you please combine the groceries into as few bags as possible and then bring those inside, honey bear?” Okay, so...ignoring for now the emotional scars that will be left as a result of being [Trevor in a room with his Mom] called “honey bear”… …how does Trevor figure out how many bags to consolidate all the groceries into? As with any word problem, he should start by going over it very carefully to make sure he understands all the information, what information is necessary, [Man scratching his head looking at a paragraph of text] and what he’s supposed to figure out. There are 9 bags… and we know how full each of them is. We’re looking for the smallest number of bags we need to fit all that stuff into. Because of that…does Trevor really need to know how many groceries fit in each bag? Panic-stricken though the boy is, he feels he might be able to solve this brain-teaser by disregarding that little tidbit… So…he starts with the 5 bags that are half full. [Grocery bags half full, 3/4 full and 1/4 full] To determine how many bags worth that is, he can simply take 5 and multiply it by one-half. He gets five-halves…which we’d ordinarily reduce to 2 ½… but Trevor has a feeling it’d be better to keep this number unsimplified for the time being. Moving on. Next up are the three bags that are three-quarters full. Same deal – 3 times ¾ is 9/4. Finally, there’s one bag holding the leftovers…just ¼ full. From here, all Trevor has to do is add those together – 5/2 plus 9/4 plus ¼. 5/2 is the same as 10/4 – you can get there by multiplying both the top and bottom by 2 [Fractions of all bags together] – and now all our denominators are common. 10/4 plus 9/4 plus ¼ is 20/4…which is 5. And that is precisely how many shopping bags are needed to fit all of Mom’s groceries. Trevor’s mother couldn’t be more thrilled when her boy comes in with the appropriate [Trevor carrying 5 grocery bags] number of bags, and is encouraged that he might finally be getting over his irrational fear of rational numbers. Next challenge to work on his gripping fear of elbow-shaped pasta… [Trevor drops grocery bags as Mom holds pasta]