HOW TO DIVIDE BIG NUMBERS QUICKLY?

For those who do not live in that world it meant

Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery

They are laying a trap for you. As you spotted, making the mistake of plodding along and dividing longhand gives a tedious calculation, and loses precious minutes of exam time. I do not know anything about ASVAB but I can guess that they only want you to give your answers to a certain accuracy.

That allows you to use shortcuts.

To show them that you can think on your feet, just change the question to suit yourself and tidy it up later. For example with the question you gave,

change the 2447 to 2448 = 2400 +48

Now dividing by 480 is easier and gives 5 + 1/10 = 5.1

In a few seconds you got quite a good estimate, (one decimal place)

If you had divided longhand, (or been allowed to use a calculator), you would have got the never ending answer 5.0979166666....

To get more accuracy we would need to deduct 1/480 but you will once again change this to suit yourself and deduct 1/500 = 0.002

This is a lot easier

5.100 minus

0.002

5.098

This is now an excellent estimate with

only a tiny error (about 1.6 in 10,000)

That has taken quite a few lines to explain, but doing it is much quicker than the long division I reckon. Well, that is the way I would do it, but to be safe, ask someone who has done these tests.

As well as this there are a whole bunch of tricks for example for dividing by 5, 9 or 11

try the one explained on this video for dividing by 9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIwlBjNLpjI

I hope all goes well for you,

Regards - Ian

How To Divide Large Numbers

How To Divide Big Numbers

RE:

HOW TO DIVIDE BIG NUMBERS QUICKLY?

I have a upcoming asvab and the only way im going to finish the arithmetic reasoning on time is by dividing big numbers as fast as possible, for example numbers such as this

480/2447 (its 2447 DIVIDED BY 480)

you see i can do double digit numbers but when its 3 digit number division its very...

If you're dividing by three digits, you need to take a step back and see the target number in an easier form so it looks like, in your example, 24.47 divided by 4.8. A little mental arithmetic would tell you it can't be six so try 5 Continue across in the same vein using small number guesses.

I hope I have made that simple to understand.

........5.097

4.8)24.47

......24.0 (subtract from 24.4 = 4)

...........4 (divided by 4.8 = 0)

...........47 (divided by 4.8 = 9)

...........43.2 (subtracted from 47 = 38)

.............38 (divided by 4.8 = 7)

2447 /480 you mean.

The answer is 5.097916667

nope. long division is it.

the answer is 5.0979166