Saturday, May 30, 2009

Word problem Singapore way

Laura had 24 clips more than Holly. After she gave 5 clips to Holly, Laura had twice as many clips as Holly. How many clips did Laura have left?

This is from Singapore Challenging Word Problems book 3 (which they are now discontinuing, I heard).

I found two ways to solve this using the bar diagrams.

Solution 1. Notice that this is showing how I solved it initially, and at one point I had to adjust the length of the bar.

bar diagram solution 1



Solution 2.

bar diagram solution 2

In either case, once you get that x = 9 (the amount of clips Holly had in the beginning), it's easy to solve that Laura had 28 clips left after giving 5 to Holly.



Algebraically:

Initially Laura has L, Holly has L - 24. (Obviously you could also choose to use H and let Laura have H + 24.)

Then Laura gives 5 to Holly, so now Laura has L - 5 and Holly has L - 24 + 5 which is L - 19.

At this point Laura has double as many clips as Holly: L - 5 = 2(L - 19) and we can solve.

L - 5 = 2L - 38
L = 33.

Laura had 33 - 5 = 28 after she gave 5 to Holly.

There are probably other ways to solve this as well.

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