Rational Numbers

Have you ever eaten half of a pizza, measured three-quarters of a liter of milk, or run five-eighths of a kilometer in a park?

Although these numbers represent different quantities in everyday life, they all belong to the same family of numbers, called rational numbers. These fractions can also be written in decimal form.

A rational number is any number that can be written as the quotient of two integers, p and q. Also, q cannot be zero because division by zero is undefined.

For the examples, half of a pizza, three-quarters of a liter of milk, and five-eighths of a kilometer, each of these numbers can be written as a quotient of two integers, so they are all rational numbers.

Rational numbers can be negative when either p or q is a negative integer. For example, a negative half or a negative five-eighths is also a rational number.

Now, the question arises: What happens when q is equal to 1?

In this case, the rational number becomes p over 1, which is simply p, an integer. This means that every integer can be written as a quotient of two integers. So, integers also belong to the family of rational numbers.