Two Pots Make Four

A Maths Starter of The Day

You are standing at a well with two pots. One holds seven litres and the other holds five litres. Neither pot has any markings so the only amount of water you can measure accurately is when a pot is full.

Big Pot               Small Pot

How can you measure out exactly four litres?

 

 

 

 

Starter of The Day Menu | Transum Software | Privacy Policy


Keywords: Starter | Logic

  • Ben Shapland, Queen's Taunton
  • Friday, February 26, 2010
  • "This is on Die Hard 3, full title "Die Hard with a Vengance". I want to be a cop when I grow up."
  • 5G, Sheffield
  • Wednesday, February 16, 2011
  • "We thought this was a tricky problem to start with but we got there in about 5 minutes."

How did you use this starter? Can you suggest how teachers could present or develop this resource? Do you have any comments? It is always useful to receive feedback and helps make this free resource even more useful for Maths teachers anywhere in the world.
Click here to enter your comments.

If you don't have the time to provide feedback we'd really appreciate it if you could give this page a score! We are constantly improving and adding to these starters so it would be really helpful to know which ones are most useful. Simply click on a button below:

Excellent, I would like to see more like this
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 3.8 out of 5 based on 64 votes.

 

Previous Day | This starter is for 19 February | Next Day


Transum Shop Visit the Transum Online Shop Transum Shop
Transum Shop

 

One Answer

Fill the large pot then use it to fill the smaller pot. That will leave two litres in the larger pot.

Empty the small pot then pour the two litres from the larger pot into the smaller pot.

Fill the large pot then use it to fill the smaller pot. It will only take three more litres leaving four litres in the larger pot.
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=February19

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

www.transum.org/go/?to=Jugs