Categories
A Level

Stuart’s Puzzle

A couple of weeks ago Stuart Price (@sxpmaths) posted this question on Twitter

  
I hadn’t really thought about it before but it is a bit strange that we ask similar questions about the mean in Year 7 but (I at least) have never asked an A-Level student this kind of question before. 

I think it’s a really nice little question, one that is harder than you expect and gives students plenty of time to practise their algebra. My workings are below; as you can see I made a few little errors that I had to correct as I went and of course I used Wolfram Alpha instead of solving the quadratic manually! 

  
I will definitely be using this next year when I teach S1. 

Categories
Problems Teaching

My First @solvemymaths Problem

This morning I woke up to the problem shown below by the excellent @solvemymaths on my Twitter feed.

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I’ve always been very lazy and not properly solved any of his puzzles before, partly because I have a strange irrational fear of geometry. Wanting to conquer this fear I thought I’d have a quick go at this.
It turned out to be quite straight forward really (although I did make a silly mistake and got an original answer that seemed odd). My workings with my mistake are shown below:

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