Explanation:
Any situation in which 40 items are divided into 8 or 5 divisions will be modeled by an equation of this sort. A couple of possibilities are ...
- "There are 40 in all, and 8 in each group. How many groups are there?"
- "There are 40 in all, divided into 8 groups. How many are in each group?"
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The "items" could be any sort of units of measure: beads, people, tickets, feet, yards, square miles, cubic millimeters, stars in the sky, whatever. The idea is that grouping by 8 or 5 gives you 5 or 8 groups, respectively.
