I have a hard time understanding the process of adding fractions with unlike denominators, and I usually will go on Khan Academy to look at tutorials and walkthroughs but I can't do that during school (only when I'm doing my homework @ home). Can somebody put it simply?

Example from my homework:
3 3/15 + 4 2/5

3 3/15 + 4 2/5

First, find the common denominator. That's the number that is evenly divisible by both denominators.

In this example, the common denominator is 15.

15/5 = 3
3 * 2 = 6
2/5 = 6/15

3 3/15 + 4 6/15 = 7 9/15 = 7 3/5

Sure! Adding fractions with unlike denominators can be a bit tricky, but I'll try to explain it simply for you.

To add fractions with unlike denominators, you need to find a common denominator. The common denominator is a multiple of both denominators. In this case, the denominators are 15 and 5.

To find the common denominator, you can list the multiples of each denominator (15 and 5) until you find a common one. The multiples of 15 are 15, 30, 45, 60, and so on. The multiples of 5 are 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and so on.

From the list, you can see that the least common multiple (LCM) of 15 and 5 is 15. So, the common denominator for your fractions is 15.

Now, we need to convert each fraction to have a denominator of 15. You can do this by multiplying the numerator and denominator of each fraction by the same number that will give you the desired denominator.

For the first fraction, 3 3/15, we need to convert the whole number to a fraction. Since 3 is the same as 3/1, we can rewrite the first fraction as (3/1) + (3/15). Now, to get the fraction's denominator to be 15, we multiply the numerator and denominator of the first fraction by 15. This gives us (3 * 15)/(1 * 15) + (3/15) = 45/15 + 3/15.

For the second fraction, 4 2/5, we need to do the same process. Convert the whole number (4) to a fraction (4/1), and then multiply both the numerator and denominator by the factor that gives us a denominator of 15. In this case, multiplying both 2 and 5 by 3 will give us (2 * 3)/(5 * 3) + (4 * 3)/(1 * 3) = 6/15 + 12/15.

Now that we have both fractions with a common denominator of 15, we can simply add the numerators together while keeping the denominator the same. So, we have 45/15 + 3/15 = 48/15.

However, this fraction can be simplified further. Both 48 and 15 can be divided by 3, giving us 16/5 as the final answer.

I hope that explanation was helpful! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.