If your kids are schooling from home right now, we have the perfect math home learning solution for you! Usually we share one word problem a week to help students practice their math skills. This week however, because we know that so many families are practicing distance learning, we are including a math word problem for ALL grade and skill levels, from lower elementary through Algebra.
Find the word problem below that’s the right skill level for you and give it a try. Take your time working it out — no peeking! — and when you feel you’ve found the solution, look below to check your solution against ours.
Enjoy your fun math practice, and be sure to check back next week for more!
LOWER ELEMENTARY
Question: Anna picks twice as many tomatoes as Brayden. Catherine picks 12 more tomatoes than Brayden. If Catherine picks 16 tomatoes, then how many tomatoes does Anna pick?
UPPER ELEMENTARY
Question: Francis is chopping a 10-layered onion. He first cuts the onion in half vertically, from stem to roots. He then cuts each half of the onion 4 times. How many pieces of onion does Francis have after he separates all the layers?
MIDDLE SCHOOL
Question: John is growing broccoli in his garden. He plants the broccoli in the morning on April 1. 96,480 minutes later, he harvests the broccoli. On what date does John harvest the broccoli?
(You may look up how many days are in each month.)
ALGEBRA AND UP
Question: A strawberry has 1 seed per 5 square millimeters on its surface. Use the formula for the surface area of a cone—surface area = πr(r+sqrt[h2 + r2])—to approximate the number of seeds on an almost-cone-shaped strawberry whose height is 36 mm and whose diameter at its widest is 54 mm. Round your answer to the nearest whole number.
Have you worked out the answer to the word problem you chose? Take your time finding the solution, we know you can do it! When you’re ready to check your work, look below to find our solutions.
LOWER ELEMENTARY
Solution: Catherine has 16 tomatoes, so Brayden must have 16 – 12 = 4 tomatoes. Anna has twice as many, so she has 4 × 2 = 8 tomatoes.
UPPER ELEMENTARY
Solution: There are 10 layers of onion, so we can think of that as 10 pieces. When Francis cuts the onion in half, that makes twice as many pieces: 10 × 2 = 20. When he cuts each half onion horizontally 4 times, he multiplies the number of pieces by 5: 20 × 5 = 100.
MIDDLE SCHOOL
Solution: If we divide 96,480 minutes by 60 minutes, we find that John harvested the broccoli 1,608 hours after he planted it. 1,608 hours ÷ 24 hours = 67 days. So, John harvested the broccoli on June 7, 67 days after April 1.
ALGEBRA AND UP
Solution: Answers may vary, depending on where in the process you round. Since the diameter of the strawberry is 54 mm, its radius is 27 mm. When we substitute those values into the equation, we find that the surface area of a cone with the same dimensions is 1,944π square millimeters. If we divide that by 5, we get 388.8π, or about 1,221. So, we can approximate that the strawberry has 1,221 seeds.
If you found these practice word problems useful, you might be interested in learning more about Mathnasium@home, which gives you the same face-to-face Mathnasium instruction used in our centers for over 15 years, delivered in real time through your computer.
