Why can you multiply by zero but not divide?

Question

Go easy on me.

In: Mathematics

Answer 1

You can have zero groups of something.

What you can’t do is work out how many groups of zero objects you would need to total another number than zero.

Ten million groups of zero objects won’t even get you to 1 object in total, nor will 20 million groups, or 12, or 500 billion.

And though zero is an exception, that doesn’t help either. Zero groups of zero objects will total zero. But so will 1, 2, 3, 50 quintillion. So what’s the ‘answer’ when you divide by zero? Either no answer at all, or every single possible answer imaginable.

Multiplying is easy. Dividing by zero is impossible and gives only nonsense answers.