To divide a decimal by another decimal, you must first convert the divisor to a whole number. Lets take a look at the following problem:
In order to divide this problem we must convert our divisor of 6.2 into an integer by moving the decimal place to the right until you get an integer.
The reason we can do this is because a division problem is equivalent to a fraction, we can write the problem as so:
Since according to the
Multiplicative Identity we can multiply any number by 1, and 10/10 = 1, we can change this problem to be 159.34/62. Once we have an integer for our divisor, we can proceed with our problem.
The first thing we must do is place the decimal point in our answer right above where the decimal point is in our dividend.
We can now perform long division as normal making sure to keep our numbers aligned in our answer.
After performing long division we get our answer of 2.57
Dividing a Decimal by a Whole Number
If you have a problem where you divide a decimal by an integer, you perform the exact same operations as above. The only difference is that since you already have a whole number as the divisor, you can skip the step of moving the decimal point and start with putting the decimal point above the same position in the dividend.