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Sunday, August 20, 2006

Just a Question of Practice

Some 11+ children actually like questions like:

How many centimetres are there in six kilometres?

But is it a worthy eleven plus question to demand:

Change 4.5 million centimetres to kilometres and metres.

It is a pity that the 11+ examination does not only ask useful questions like:

Three children divide 280 sweets among them so that Julie gets 40 more than either of the others. How many does Julie get?

Unequal sharing could come up in real life in the years ahead. Changing centimetres to kilometres may appeal to a more limited audience.

When the thorny question of inheritance comes up it must be useful for someone in the family to be able to divide £6000000 between two people so that one gets half as much as the other. Perhaps the extra practice with the number of zeros in the metric questions will help on the sharing question.

It would be very sad for one party to leave a zero out on the sharing question!

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