Lower Elementary:
Question: Paul has 2 quarters and 1 dime. Sarah has 4 dimes and 5 nickels. How much money do they have altogether?
Answer: $1.25
Solution: 2 quarter are worth 50¢ and 1 dime is worth 10¢. So Paul has 50¢ + 10¢ = 60¢. 4 dimes are worth 40¢ and 5 nickels are worth 25¢. So Sarah has 40¢ + 25¢ = 65¢. So together they have 60¢ + 65¢ = 125¢ = $1.25.
Upper Elementary:
Question: The entire second grade class is going on a field trip. There are 5 second grade classes, each one has 30 students. If a bus can hold 40 students, how many buses do they need so that every student has a ride?
Answer: 4 buses
Solution: First, let’s find the total number of students that need a bus ride. There are 5 classes and each class has 30 students. 5 × 30 = 150. There are 150 students going on the field trip. Each bus can hold 40 students. 150 × 40 = 3 3/4. It does not make sense to have 3/4 of a bus, so they will need a total of 4 buses so that every student has a ride.
Middle School:
Question: Carlos, his mom, and his dad are on the same phone data plan. For their data plan, they spend $80 for 10GB of data. They decided to split their data bill based on how much data each person used. Carlos used 65% of the data, his mom used 2GB of data, and his dad used the rest. How much does each person pay?
Answer: Carlos pays $52, his mom pays $16, and his dad pays $12
Solution: One way to solve this problem is to find the percent of data each family member used and then find out how much they pay. Carlos used 65% of his data. His mom used 2GB of the data. Since their plan has 10GB, she used 2/10 = 20/100 = 20% of the data. This means that Carlos’ dad used 100% – 65% – 20% = 15%. Now we can find out how much each person pays. 65% of $80 = $52, so Carlos pays $52. 20% of $80 = $16, so his mom pays $16. 15% of $80 = $12, so his dad pays $12.
Algebra and Up:
Question: Wendy needs to make a 4 character password. The first character has to be a vowel. The second character has to be a prime number. The third character has to be one of the first ten letters of the alphabet. The last character has to be a number that cannot be the same as the second character. How many possible combinations for passwords can Wendy make?
Answer: 1,800 combinations
Solution: There are 5 vowels, so there are 5 options for the first character. 2, 3, 5, and 7 are the single digit prime numbers, so there are 4 options for the second character. The third character is one of the first 10 letters, so there are 10 options for the third character. The last character cannot be the same as the second character. There are 10 digits, but one of them was used as the second character. So there are 9 options for the fourth character. The total number of possible combinations is 5 × 4 × 10 × 9 = 1,800.
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