Thursday, July 12, 2018

ATM #beingmathematical. Cows eat grass

This is my 'homework' in advance of the ATM #beingmathematical session on 12 July 2018.

Here is the question:


The instructions were to think about how we thought about the problem.  Below are my ideas, including things I did wrong!  My thinking is in red and the maths is in blue.




Was there a way to do this without so much algebra?

1 comment:

Mr Thornton said...

What a wonderful problem! I'm fairly certain I've seen it before, but equally certain that I can't remember where. I'm a bit late to the party but...I thought about this in terms of "velocity"-time graphs, so horizontal lines and areas of rectangles. I think the equivalent kinematics problem would look something like: "Car A passes at point P, travelling at constant speed. Some time later, Car B and Car C pass P. B, travelling at 20u, overtakes A after 30 days. C, travelling at 30u, overtakes B after 15 days." Perhaps I will try rewriting some kinematics problems in terms of other rates for when my class revises v-t graphs later this year.