Word Problem Wednesday: Math Practice is Just Peachy

“There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't even started wondering about yet.”   â€•Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach

There’s a great big world out there to discover, and we’re going to need MATH to help us understand it! This is why it’s important to learn foundational math skills and fit in a little bit of math practice every day. This week’s word problem challenge will help you workout your elementary math skills with a little bit of division, subtraction, and even some weights conversion, all wrapped up in a quick and fun math activity!

Go ahead and put on your thinking cap and solve this challenge. And be sure to check below to find the solution.

Challenge: Eight friends each eat a pound of peach each day. If they’re eating a giant peach that weighs 8 tons and the pit of the peach weighs half a ton, then how many days will it take for the friends to eat the whole peach?

Solution: First, we need to know how many pounds of peach the friends are eating. Since a ton is 2,000 pounds, 8 tons is 16,000 pounds. The peach pit weighs half a ton, which is 1,000 pounds, so the friends eat a total of 15,000 pounds of peach. In total, they eat 8 pounds of peach per day, so we divide 15,000 ÷ 8 to find that it will take them 1,875 days to eat the whole peach.

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(Illustration above by Nancy Ekholm Burkert from the first edition of James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl.)