A furniture maker is building a bookshelf she needs to cut rectangular pieces of wood to a length of 5/12 foot and a width of 2/3 foot what is the area of a piece of wood that size

To find the area, what do you do with these two numbers?

Multiple

yes, multiply

Damon how do we know that we are multiple?? And not divide

When calculating area, you always multiply. Area= Length X Width.

Jenny, please study this site about area.

http://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/rectangle.html

Because to find the area of a rectangle you multiply the length by the width.

To figure out why, draw a picture 10 inches by 5 inches and divide it up into columns one inch wide and rows inch high.

Then count the number of one inch by one inch square boxes.

You will get 50 of them, 5 times 10 :)

To find the area of the rectangular piece of wood, you need to multiply its length by its width.

Given:
Length = 5/12 foot
Width = 2/3 foot

To multiply fractions, you multiply the numerators (top numbers) together and the denominators (bottom numbers) together. Therefore, the area can be calculated as:

Area = (5/12) * (2/3)

To simplify the multiplication, you can cancel out common factors between the numerators and denominators. In this case, you can cancel out a factor of 3 between the 12 and the 3.

Area = (5/4) * (2/1)

Now, multiply the numerators together and the denominators together:

Area = (5 * 2) / (4 * 1)

Area = 10 / 4

To simplify further, you can divide both the numerator and denominator by their highest common factor, which is 2.

Area = 5 / 2

Therefore, the area of a rectangular piece of wood with a length of 5/12 foot and a width of 2/3 foot is 5/2 square feet.