Hole in One

A Maths Starter of The Day

If six girls can plant 90 trees in a day, how many trees can ten girls plant in a day?
If five men can dig a hole in one hour, how long will it take two men to dig half a hole?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Keywords: Starter | Arithmetic

  • Petro Els, Greenmeadows School, NZ
  • Wednesday, March 19, 2008
  • "Cool idea. Worked magic. . . THANKS!"
  • Rawthorpe High School, Mr Heeley's Y7 brainboxes
  • Wednesday, March 19, 2008
  • "Ha ha, you had us fooled! We think, however, that theoretically the answer would be 75 mins. We can't believe you've tricked us like this. I now want to find a whole hole (or half a hole!) to jump in and hide from my clever pupils!
    Happy Easter, love set 1 in da Hud xx"
  • Zara, Belmont Academy
  • Wednesday, March 19, 2008
  • "Really cool. Very good trick and wasn't expecting it!"
  • Mrs Cooper, AHS
  • Tuesday, March 17, 2009
  • "Most of my class realised that it was a trick. However they also worked out 1 hour and 15 mins. 8Y."
  • 7cd/M2, King Alfred's College Oxfordshire
  • Thursday, March 19, 2009
  • "Liam and Louis figures you can't dig half a hole ! But the rest of us fell in it!!
    For the 2nd question, we thought the answer would be: 1 man takes 5 hours so 2 men take 4 hours. So for half a hole it would take 2 hours."
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  • Bona, King George V School
  • Tuesday, March 09, 2010
  • "It's a really good question.150 trees and you can't dig half a hole!"
  • Year 6, Tickhill St. Mary's
  • Friday, March 19, 2010
  • "We think it would take 2 men a fortnight to dig half a hole...because it would take them that long to work out that you can't dig half a hole! ;)."
  • Lauren Cowie, High School Of Dundee
  • Friday, March 19, 2010
  • "You tricked us and it is really strange because each day you seem to choose a topic that we are doing in class :D."
  • Miss Reakes, West Island School
  • Monday, March 21, 2011
  • "Not one of my set 2 Yr10 class made the leap to realising there is no such thing as half a hole! Then we went on to discuss how not to take everything at face value. Classic starter!
    The students struggled with the concept of half a whole not existing... The word volume would need to be added. Maybe they just didn't like to be tricked......!!!!"

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This starter has scored a mean of 3.6 out of 5 based on 62 votes.

 

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Answers

150 trees

It is impossible to dig half a hole!


Computer Teacher, do your students have access to computers?
Do you have "Laptops in Lessons"?

Whether your students each have a TabletPC or share a desktop PC, this activity lends itself to eLearning (Engaged Learning).

Laptop

Here is the URL which will take them to a concise version of this page.

Transum.org/go/?Start=March19

Here's the URL which will take
them to a student version of this activity.

http://www.transum.org/go/?to=Unitary