There are five bales of hay. When the bales of hay are weighed, they are weighed in pairs of two. When weighed, they were weighed in all possible pairs of two, like so: bales 1 &2, bales 1 &3, bales 1 & When weighed, they were weighed in all possible pairs of two, like so: bales 1&2, bales 1&3, bales 1&4, bales 1&5, bales 2&3, bales 2&4, bales 2&5, bales 3&4, bales 3&5, and bales 4&5. There are also 10 different weights and they are: 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, and 91. My task is to find out how much each bale weighs. When I am done looking for solutions, I might have to look back over the problem to see if I can find some easier way to find the weights.
Process
Well I worked with 3 other people to get the answer. So we knew that the numbers had to be in in the high thirty’s to high forty’s. So we just started to try number until we got a few of the pairs to match up to the weights. Well we went through all the number s between 35 and 50 and what we did from there was just eliminate numbers that didn’t work, so that how we found the five individual weights for each bale. So we did this on the white board, but what we did first after we got a good feeling about the numbers we had left was plug them into the bales. We lined up the bales in sort of a circle shape and drew arrows with the numbers on them to see what to numbers equal what weight. As you can see we found all the number with the arrows that have to weights on them.
Solution
If you don’t understand it from the picture of our work I will explain it neater.
Bale #1=41lbs
Bale #2=44lbs
Bale #3=39lbs
Bale #4=43lbs
Bale #5=47lbs
Self-Assessment/Extension
I worked with a small group of classmates and I think that is a good strategy because they might have a better idea than you or they might think of something differently.