Exploring Tenths and Hundredths

Imagine you have a delicious chocolate bar and you divide it into 10 equal pieces. Each piece is $\\frac{1}{10}$ of the whole bar. In the world of decimals, we write this as $0.1$. The decimal point is a separator that tells us we are looking at pieces smaller than one whole. The first place to the right of the decimal point is called the tenths place. If you have 4 pieces, you have $\\frac{4}{10}$, which we write as $0.4$ and say as 'four tenths'.

What if we took those 10 pieces and cut each one into 10 even smaller bits? Now we have 100 tiny pieces! Each tiny piece is $\\frac{1}{100}$ of the whole. We write this as $0.01$. This is the hundredths place, which is the second spot to the right of the decimal point. Think of it like money: a penny is $\\frac{1}{100}$ of a dollar, or $0.01$. If you have 25 pennies, you have $0.25$ of a dollar, which we call 'twenty-five hundredths'.

A number line helps us see exactly where decimals live. Between the whole numbers $0$ and $1$, there are infinite tiny spots. If we mark 10 equal spaces, each mark is a tenth ($0.1, 0.2, 0.3...$). If we look even closer between $0.1$ and $0.2$, we can find hundredths like $0.15$. Visualizing decimals this way helps us compare them. For example, $0.7$ is further to the right than $0.4$, so $0.7$ is greater.