You couldn’t pay us to resit our Junior Cert, let alone the Leaving.
The stress, the anxiety... The maths skills.
In the UK, 200,000 13-year olds sat the 2016 UK Intermediate Mathematical Challenge – and when we saw the questions, we shrank back in our seats.
Writing for
The Guardian, resident mathematician and education correspondent Alex Bellos compiled a series of question to put you to your test.
If like us, this is too much for a Tuesday morning, we’ve included the answers below:
1. What is the value of 6102 − 2016?
2.Which of the following fractions is closest to 1?
3. One-third of the animals in Jacob's flock are goats, the rest are sheep. There are twelve more sheep than goats.
How many animals are there altogether in Jacob's flock?
4. The net shown consists of squares and equilateral triangles. The net is folded to form a rhombicuboctahedron, as shown.
When the face marked P is placed face down on a table, which face will be facing up?
5. Tegwen has the same number of brothers as she has sisters. Each one of her brothers has 50% more sisters than brothers.
How many children are in Tegwen's family?
6. How many of the above positive integers are divisible by 24?
7. A list of positive integers has a median of 8, a mode of 9 and a mean of 10.
What is the smallest possible number of integers in the list?
8. In a particular group of people, some always tell the truth, the rest always lie. There are 2016 in the group. One day, the group is sitting in a circle. Each person in the group says, “Both the person on my left and the person on my right are liars.”
What is the difference between the largest and smallest number of people who could be telling the truth?
9. Every day, Aimee goes up an escalator on her journey to work. If she stands still, it takes her 60 seconds to travel from the bottom to the top. One day the escalator was broken so she had to walk up it. This took her 90 seconds.
How many seconds would it take her to travel up the escalator if she walked up at the same speed as before while it was working?
10. The tiling pattern shown uses two types of tile, regular hexagons and equilateral triangles, with the length of each side of the equilateral triangles equal to half the length of each side of the hexagons. A large number of tiles is used to cover a floor.
Which of the following is closest to the fraction of the floor that is shaded black?
Answers:
1.4086
2.10/11
3.36
4.D
5.11
6.1
7.6
8.336
9.36
10.1/13
