Hi, welcome to Math Antics. In this video, we’re gonna learn about Arithmetic.

Sometimes when people use the word “arithmetic” they just use it to mean the same thing as the word “math” or “working with numbers”.

But often, it’s used more specifically to refer to four basic math operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

And that’s how we’re gonna use the word in this video

and we’re gonna spend the rest of the video talking about these four important math operations.

But what does that mean, “math operations”?

…scalpel…

…forceps…

Well there’s your problem!

Uh… not exactly.

Math involves both numbers and operations and the operations just tell you what to DO with the numbers.

For example, the addition operation tells us to take two numbers and to combine their values.

If we have the amount 2 and we add it to the amount 3, we end up with the amount 5.

That’s addition… it combines two amounts.

The subtraction operation tells us to take one number away from another number.

In other words, if we start with an amount (like 5) and we subtract (or take away) the amount 3 from it, we have only 2 left over.

Subtraction takes an amount away from another amount.

The multiplication operation tells us to take one number and then repeat it a certain number of times.

It’s basically just repeated addition.

For example, if we have the amount 5 and we multiply it by 3, that mean we combine 3 groups of 5 to get a total of 15.

So 5 times 3 is the same as 5 + 5 + 5 …see how it’s just repeated addition?

Multiplication takes an amount and repeats it a number of times.

And finally, the division operation tells us to take a number and divide it into a certain number of equal groups.

For example, if we start with the amount 15 and we divide that by 3, that means we want to separate 15 into 3 groups that are the same size.

In this case that would be 3 groups of 5. So division takes an amount and separates it into a number of equally sized groups.

If you think about it, you’ll see that this is similar to repeated subtraction.

To make arithmetic easier to write down, each of these operation gets its own symbol, and some of them even have more than one symbol.

For addition, we use this symbol (called a ‘plus’ sign) to show that two numbers are being added.

So when you see a math operation like this, you just say “2 plus 1”.

For subtraction, we use this symbol (called a ‘minus’ sign) to show when a number is being subtracted from another.

When reading this sign, you usually say “2 minus 1” or “2 take away 1”.

For multiplication, we use this symbol that looks a lot like an ‘x’. It’s called the ‘times’ symbol.

So this problem would read, “3 times 4”.

Oh, and sometimes other symbols like a dot or an asterisk are also used to show multiplication.

And finally, for division we use this symbol, which we usually just call ‘the division sign’.

And we read it like this… “8 divided by 2”.

And there are several other types of division signs that are commonly used too.

This one is used to do long division.

And the fraction line is also a really useful way to show division and so is a slash like this.