A ribbon is 40 inches long. We want to cut the ribbon into pieces. Each piece will be of an inch. How many pieces will we have?

40

Step-by-step explanation:

What we need here is to know how many of 1 inch are there in 40 inches

This is straightforward, what we need to do here is to imagine having to mark 1 inch length on the ribbon using a mark of a scissors.

What we will notice is that we need to make 40 marks to have exhausted the entire length of the ribbon.

This is obtained by dividing the total 40 by 1 which is 40