Main content
Course: Grade 5 (TX TEKS) > Unit 1
Lesson 1: Estimate addition and subtraction of whole numbers- Estimating multi-digit sums
- Estimate to add multi-digit numbers
- Estimating to subtract multi-digit numbers
- Estimate to subtract multi-digit numbers
- Estimating multi-digit addition and subtraction word problems
- Multi-digit addition and subtraction estimation word problems
© 2024 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Estimating multi-digit addition and subtraction word problems
Practice using estimation as a strategy to add and subtract larger multi-digit numbers. Created by Sal Khan.
Video transcript
- [Instructor] We're told Minli
has 158,718 flight points, I guess those are like
frequent flyer miles, through an airline award program. She gained 21,118 flight points. About how many total flight
points does Minli have now? So why don't you pause this
video and have a go at it. And remember, they don't
want you to figure out the exact number. They just say about how many, so you just need to have
a reasonable estimate. Alright, now let's work
through this together. So 21,118 flight points,
if I were to round it to the nearest 10,000, that's going to be about
20,000 flight points. And then 158,718, if
I round that similarly to the nearest 10,000, I
wouldn't wanna round it to the nearest hundred thousand because then I'm rounding
it at different levels. So if I round it to the nearest 10,000, then that is going to be approximately 160,000 flight points. And then if I were to add
those two numbers together, that means that Minli has about 180,000 frequent flyer
miles or flight points. Let's do another example. So here, they're telling us the Nile River is 6,650 kilometers. The Tigris River is 1,950 kilometers, I'm assuming kilometers long. About how many meters longer is the Nile than the Tigris River? So pause this video and have a go at that. Alright, let's work through this. So let's see, they both
are in the thousands, so let's just round them
both to the nearest thousand. The Nile River, if I were to round it to the nearest thousand, is
approximately 7,000 kilometers. And the Tigris River, if I round
it to the nearest thousand, is approximately 2000 kilometers. So if I were to estimate
this, I would say, how much longer is the
Nile than the Tigris? It would be 7,000 - 2000,
which is approximately, well, that's 5,000, but I'm estimating the difference
between these two numbers, which would be approximately
5,000 kilometers.