In this lesson, we're going to look at an example of a word problem that has fractions in it. A rectangular garden has a width of five and one fourth yards and a length of eight yards. Find the area of the garden. Many times when we're working with word problems, it's helpful for us to draw a picture. So let's set up a picture of this garden. Our garden has a width of five and one fourth and a length of eight. Now they're asking us to find the area. So we need to know the formula for calculating the area of a rectangle. The area of a rectangle is equal to the length times the width. Or sometimes you might also see it as the base times the height which means the same thing, just different terms. So the length of a rectangle is eight and the width is five and one fourth. So we're going to multiply those together. Of course, keep in mind that we have a fraction here. Even though our first number is a whole number, our second number is a mixed fraction, we still have that fraction in there. And when we're multiplying fractions together, it's helpful to set them up so that they are just fractions and don't have whole numbers. So the first thing that we're going to do is write that number eight so that it looks like a fraction, which we can just write as eight over one. Any whole number can be set up as a fraction by just writing a one underneath as the denominator. And now the five and one fourth, we want to change that to an improper fraction so it doesn't have that whole number part with it. So five and one fourth as an improper fraction will be 21 fourths. And of course we're multiplying so we can put our multiplication symbol in between. And now we multiply the fractions like normal. Remember with multiplying fractions you just multiply across. So multiply the numerators together and multiply the denominators. Okay, so we multiply the eight times 21. We get 168 for the numerator. And for our denominator, one times four gives us four. And then we can simplify this by dividing. Remember that fractions can be simplified using division. And in this case, our denominator is actually a factor of the numerator. So we're going to get a whole number as the answer. So we do 168 divided by four, we get the whole number of 42. So our final answer, we can say that the area of the garden, is 42 square yards. Remember that when we're dealing with area, the unit is always going to be squared. So we put the little two with it.