When written as a word; what is the smallest positive whole number with the letter "a" in it?
Some think the answer is a thousand,
others think one hundred and one.
(see comments below)
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Keywords: Starter
| Vocabulary
One Hundred And One ..."
Teacher: “I challenge you all to see who can come up with the most words that don’t contain the letters A, B or C in 30 seconds. Go!”
Students: “Sky… Pie … Moon … Lesson… etc” [They will typically come up with around 10 words in the 30 seconds]
Teacher: “Now it’s my turn. Go! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen etc” [It will be very easy for the Teacher to beat the students]"
All was sure that it was: 'One hundred AND one'
Very good starters to get you thinking and debate about!"
"Negative, negative one""
This got me thinking about the cross-curricular possibilities for nthis starter.
In French, the answer is "quatre" (4), in German "acht" (8) and in Spanish "cuatro" (4).
Which languages give the smallest positive answer?
Bosnian and Croatian each have "jedan" for "one". In Czech, it's "jedna"
Slovenian (ena), Indonesian (satu), Portuguese (uma) and Basque (bat) also have words for "one" with an "a" in them.
Finnish (kaksi) and Swedish (twa) are like Polish, having an "a" in their word for "two".
English seems to be the only language I could find with no such number until "thousand". The next highest was Danish, which did not have a number with an "a" in it until "atten" (18)
I have more, but fear most lost interest long ago!!"
the proper way to say 101 is "one hundred one"
the answer is a thousAnd."
Good, achieved the results I required
Satisfactory
Didn't really capture the interest of the students
Not for me! I wouldn't use this type of activity.
This starter has scored a mean of 3.2 out of 5 based on 29 votes.
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