. For a picnic, John bought 32 packages of hamburger buns with 12 buns per package. After the picnic, he counted the buns that were left. John counted 2 full packages of buns and 5 more buns left. How many buns were used at the picnic?

This law is sometimes called the grouping property. as you can see, regardless of how the numbers are grouped, the answer is still 13. the associative law of multiplication is similar to the same law for addition. it says that no matter how you group numbers you are multiplying together, you will get the same answer.