Common Muliples

Yes thanks Dr Peterson, I get it now it's just been a long time since I studied math properly and I have forgotten so much I really have.

I've never viewed one person as sharing something when that something has been kept to oneself. In the UK we'd call that selfishness, kind of like when a child has toys but won't let another child play with them. Now if you had 12 chocolate bars then I suppose you could say that one person is sharing 12 chocolates with oneself, but I normally see sharing involving another person or more. Mathematically it probably means completely different, and that is why at this time I'm struggling with the interpretation of the questions. Lack of experience I suppose.
 
Okay. Your difficulty is not with math at all, but with English. That is the first thing you need to understand!

It is true that math word problems sometimes use English in slightly different ways than we would everyday; in particular, we tend to extend the usage of words to the edge of their normal meaning (called a "degenerate case") -- in this case extending "share" to the case of one person. They might instead have said "split" among any number of people, but you would have the same objection! All they mean is that every person in the group can get a whole number of pieces (even if the "group" is only one person!). All of this feels natural to a mathematician; unfortunately, the only way around it is to use more words (which mathematicians don't like to do).

One thing I have found I need, not only in interpreting math word problems, but also in everyday life, is that if what someone is saying does make sense taken literally, I have to look for a way to interpret it that makes sense, and move on! In this case, you could either just ignore "groups of 1" (which, as I've mentioned, don't affect the problem at all), or accept that, to the author of the problem, one person can "share" a box of chocolates alone. (In my view, he is not being selfish, because he is the only person there, and was given the box. But such value judgments are not part of the math. "Sharing" here just means taking one's share, which in this case is the whole thing.)

Again, the main thing is to learn to accept little inconsistencies in language, and go with the main ideas. This is similar to what an autistic person, who may take language too literally, has to do every day -- perhaps with a little humor and grace toward the people who say such odd things to him.
 
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