Girl Planting Man in hole

Plant More Trees

Maths Lesson Starter of The Day

If six girls can plant 90 trees in a day, how many trees can ten girls plant in five days?

If five men can dig a hole in one hour, how long will it take two men to dig half a hole?


Topics: Starter | Arithmetic | Problem Solving | Ratio

  • Petro Els, Greenmeadows School, NZ
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  • Cool idea. Worked magic. . . THANKS!
  • Rawthorpe High School, Mr Heeley's Y7 brainboxes
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  • 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
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  • Really cool. Very good trick and wasn't expecting it!
  • Mrs Cooper, AHS
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  • 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
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  • 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.
  • Bona, King George V School
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  • It's a really good question.150 trees and you can't dig half a hole!
  • Year 6, Tickhill St. Mary's
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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......!!!!
  • Mr Kavanagh's Fifth Class, Cork, Ireland
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  • Our class feels that if the sum specifies a quantity (i.e. the hole) as x then half a hole would be x/2 and so mathematically the question does make sense. The answer is 1 hour and fifteen minutes.
  • Amber, Wellfieldcommunityschool
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  • I found that they would plant 150 trees but you can't dig half a whole can you?
  • Tnorf, Manchester
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  • After some deep discussion and debate. We think it takes 1 man 5 hours to dig a 1 hole (whole); therefore it takes 2 men 2.5 hours to dig a full hole and it takes them half the time to dig half a hole so 1.25 hours???? I hope it's a trick question LOVED the debate oot caused! !
  • Ling, CCC NZ
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  • Should be 150 trees and 48mins to dig 1/2 of the hole.

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Answers

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Extension

Hen

If a hen and a half, lays an egg and a half, in a day and a half. How many eggs will 9 hens lay in 6 days?


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Laptops In Lessons

Teacher, do your students have access to computers such as tablets, iPads or Laptops?  This page was really designed for projection on a whiteboard but if you really want the students to have access to it here is a concise URL for a version of this page without the comments:

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Laptops In Lessons

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Transum.org/go/?Num=67

Student Activity

 



Curriculum Reference

See the National Curriculum page for links to related online activities and resources.

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