ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Distribution law

Distribution law is a rule that helps us understand how we can break up or distribute numbers when we add or multiply them together.

Let's say you have 2 apples and 3 oranges. If you want to add them together, you can think of it as 2 + 3 = 5. But what if you wanted to add 2 to each fruit and then add them together? You could do it like this:

(2 + 2) + (3 + 2) = 4 + 5 = 9

This is the distribution law in action! We broke up the numbers and added them together separately, and then added the results together.

Now let's look at how this works with multiplication. Let's say you have 4 toys and you want to give each of your 2 friends 4 toys. One way to do it is to give each friend 4 toys separately, which would be 4 x 2 = 8 toys. But you could also distribute the toys like this:

4 x (2 + 2) = 4 x 4 = 16

We broke up the multiplication into two parts: first, we multiplied 4 by 2, which gave us 8, and then we multiplied 4 by 2 again, which gave us 8 more. Adding those together, we get 16 - the same answer we got before.

So, the distribution law helps us break up numbers and complete calculations in different ways depending on what we need to do. It's a helpful tool in math that allows us to use our understanding of numbers in creative ways.