Animals in the wild are amazing! Whether it’s a sea turtle, a blue whale, a giant panda, or a lemur, they pique our interest and capture our hearts with their unique and untamed ways.
This week’s word problems focus on these fascinating creatures and give kids an opportunity to hone their math skills. Look below and choose the one that’s the right skill level for your child. Have them give it a try. And when they feel they’ve found the answer, check their solution against ours on the next page.
Questions
Lower Elementary:
Question: A sea turtle can swim 5 miles every 15 minutes. How far can the sea turtle swim in 4 hours?
Upper Elementary:
Question: An adult blue whale weighs 200 tons. An adult Hector’s dolphin weighs 125 pounds. How many times the weight of the Hector’s dolphin is the blue whale?
Middle School:
Question: A giant panda eats 30 pounds of bamboo per day. If 5 giant pandas live in a sanctuary that produces 145 pounds of edible bamboo per day and the sanctuary currently has 60 pounds of edible bamboo available to the pandas, then how long will it take for the pandas to run out of bamboo?
Algebra and Up:
Question: When a lemur leaps across the ground, it travels forward 30 feet and reaches a height of 10 feet in the air. Each leap takes 2 seconds from take-off to landing. Model the lemur’s leap with the equation of a parabola in which x = the elapsed time in seconds and y = the height off the ground in feet.
[Hint: A parabola in vertex form is written y = a(x – h)² + k when (h, k) is the vertex.]
