Why is half of 5 =2.5 and not 3?

Question

if your not too technical with the whole thumb not being a finger? you have 1,2...3.... in the middle and then 4 and 5. why not be 3? who thinks in fractions anyway?

Answer 1

Wow.
Actually when you do your finger thing you are finding the "median".
You are assigning numbers to the fingers. The middle one is "3". But if you wrote a three on it, and held only it out, it wouldn't be 3 fingers it would be one. The fingers are designated 1,2,3,4,5. Median is simply defined as the one in the middle. Thus "3"

To get half by using your fingers, you would need to leave one, remove one, leave one, remove one.
This would still leave you with a whole finger which you would need to leave half of and remove half of.

What you would end up with is 2 1/2 fingers.
Half of 5 is 2 1/2.

If you looked at all ten fingers, and removed half you would still have five. Five is half of ten.
But if you looked at the middle one...there isn't one.

Answer 2

half of 6 =3
half of 4=2
so half of 5=2.5 (in the middle)

hold up your hand, you have 5 fingers right (well, at least i hope you do, sorry if you don't!)
now bend down half of them, you cant unless you cut a finger in half

when you think 3 is half of 5 because it is in the middle of:
1 2 3 4 5

you have forgot about 0!(so you are saying that 3 is half way between 1 and 5!) try this method again with zero:
0 1 2 3 4 5
now find half way, its in between 2 and 3 therefore half of 5 is 2.5 or 2 1/2


i hope that i have helped and not confused you!

Answer 3

I think you are confused between 2 different kind of number.

Numerically half of 5 is 2.5 - No ifs no buts.
Where as, the "middle" (not half) of 5 fingers is the "third finger". This "third finger" has a numerical value of 1 not 3.

Answer 4

Well I don't completely understand the question, but if half of 5 was 3, and we know that 2*3 = 6, then 5=6. This would be a problem.

Answer 5

In fractions:
5 *1/2 or 5/2 or 2 1/2
To illustrate further:
2 boys are dividing 5 bars of chocolate:

5 - 2 = 3 more to be divided: 1 bar 4d 1st; 1 bar 4d 2nd
3 - 2 = 1 more to be divided: 2 bars 4d 1st; 2 bars 4d 2nd
They break the yet undivided 1 bar left into 2. That means additional 1/2 bar for each of them and therefore 2 plus another half for each and each one gets 2 bars and 1/2 bar.

Answer 6

You are thinking in terms of integers, like what "number" is halfway between 1 and 5.
Half of 5 is 3 when you restict the boundaries to integers, but really it is 2.5. Also remember that in cases such as these, the number system starts at 0, halfway between 0 and 5 is 2.5

Answer 7

So your fingers show you that the middle of 1 and 5 is 3, which is correct.

This has nothing to do with a half, however.
.

Answer 8

Well, you're right in your way!!

It all depends on the granularity, if you take just the numbers without fractions, it does work that way for all numbers:

half of 7 can be 4
half of 99 can be 46 etc.

which is what the term 'rounding to the nearest decimal' in mathematics is all about. So, rounding 2.5 to the nearest decimal will yield 3 which is correct!!

Answer 9

You know, this reminds me of many years ago when I was but a young kid, the corner store sold popsicles for 5 cents, now as you know, there are two parts to one complete popsicle, and in those days a nickle was very hard for a kid to come by, and once in a while we or I could scrounge up a few pennies but very seldom a whole nickle, and the store owner, nice guy that he was would split the popsicle and give us half for three cents.
Now this went on for quite a while, and one day, being short a penny, I went into the store and confronted this "nice guy" and politely asked him to sell me the two cent half he had been holding back for so long, well, that ended my relationship with that "nice guy" and from then on no nickle, no popsicle.

Answer 10

Think of the fingers as apples {I like apples}. You have five apples and two people and they each want the same amount of apple to eat. You give each person two apples and you have an apple left over so you cut it in half. Now each person has the same amount of apple, 2 1/2 or 2.5 apples. If one person had three apples the other person would only have two. The definition of half implies equality so this would obviously be incorrect.