Verified answer

a somewhat (possibly) more understandable way to do it is (375/100)*12 which gives you 3.75 * 12

or (3.75*10) + (3.75*2) if you want to break it up even further

that make anymore sense?

edit:

just to clarify

the reason you need to divide by 100 in the first step is to allow you to work with 12 instead of 0.12

0.1 being 10's and 0.01 being 100's so we needed to multiply the 0.12 with 100 in order to remove the comma and we need to do the opposit on the other side

The first step is to pretend the decimal doesn't exist. Just multiply 375 by 12. I don't know how you learned normal multiplication, but I assume if you need to know multiplication of decimals, you already know multiplication of whole numbers. But I'll walk you through a shortcut.

In the case of twelve, there's a shortcut you can take: multiply 375 by 10, which is 3750. Then multiply 375 by 2, which is 750. Add 750 to 3750 and you get 4500. That's where the decimal come in. Just count how many numbers are to the right of the decimal you are multiplying (in this case, there are 2 numbers to the right: 1 and 2). Then you put the decimal in your answer so that it has the same amount of numbers on the left. So, the answer is 45.00.