’Wordy’ Questions
What Are they?
• Wordy questions are designed to test your ability to extract
information from sentences, and to problem solve.
• You need to do this first and then do the maths, this makes them
more difficult than normal questions, but they’re usually worth more
marks because of this.
Why Are They Important?
• When you do maths in the real world, it’ll come to you in the form of
these ‘wordy’ questions.
• E.g. when you’re trying to work out what the best deal between
different phone contracts is, you’ll need to be able to extract the
maths from the info your given.
• This will come up loads through your life, so it’s good to get the hang
of it.
What Do you need to be able to do?
• 1. Extract key information from worded questions.
• 2. Work out what info is relevant to a problem and what info is not.
• 3. Be able to use that extracted info to get to an answer.
Extracting Information:
• Take the following question: 1. What does the question want you to find out?
2. What information do we need to do this?
3. What would our first step to solving the question be?
4. Work through to find the answer.
Extracting information.
• For wordy questions the first thing we always ask is ‘what is this
question trying to get me to do?’ ’what do I need to figure out as a
final answer?’
• This means you have to work out what piece of information you need
to find out to get the answer.
• From there we work backwards to get the information we need to get
to that final answer.
Extracting Information
• For Example:
• What is this question asking us to do?
• How would we go about doing that?
Extracting Information
• What about a trickier example:
• What would you do here?
Technique
• 1. Read the question, twice, slowly. I promise you will have enough
time to do this. Take the time to understand and visualise what’s
going on.
• 2. Find out what the question is asking you to do. Then, go further
and work out what pieces of information you will need for this.
• 3. Highlight or underline all the information you have worked out is
relevant, then work through the question step by step to the answer.
Questions
Questions
Questions
Questions
Questions
