A fraction is two quantities written one above the other, that shows how much of a a whole thing we have. For example we may have three quarters of a pizza:

In the above, we divided the pizza into 4 equal parts (quarters), and then kept three of them. Thus "three quarters".

• The bottom part is called the denominator, and tells how many parts it is divided into. Here four.
• The top part is called the numerator and tells us how many of these parts we have. Here three.

Converting fractions to decimals

Simply divide the top by the bottom using a calculator. So in the example below, to convert the fraction to decimal, divide the top (4) by the bottom (5) to get the result 0.8: In fact, we often read a fraction as a division. In this example, we could read it as 4 divided by 5.

Proper and Improper fractions

A proper fraction is one where the top is smaller than the bottom, such as Proper fraction are always less than 1.

An improper fraction is the reverse, where the top is larger than the bottom, such as An improper fraction can be 'reduced'. In the example above, six quarters of a pizza is more than one pizza. In fact, if we divide the fraction to make it a decimal, or one and a half pizzas.

Not just numbers

The top and/or bottom can be algebra expressions too. For example

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