More Word Problems: The State Fair and the Shoe Company

Child Enjoys The View Through the Lens of a Binocular, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

By Clarence Thompson

Below are two word problems written by my friend Craig Haynes for the upcoming Book 4 of our Elementary School Math series.  When you try to solve them, please remember the four problem-solving questions I gave in our first word problem post in this series.  In case you forgot, here they are again:

1. What do we already know?
2. What question are we trying to answer?
3. Can we turn the question into an equation? 
4. Can we solve the equation to find the answer to our question?

And now for the problems.

Problem 1.  The State Fair
Nhu took Gabby to the Oregon State fair. Nhu gave Gabby 90 ride tickets. If each ride cost 5 tickets, how many rides can Gabby go on?

Problem 2. The Shoe Company
A shoe company produces 8 different types of sneakers. If they produced a total of 6,000 pairs of sneakers for the summer, how many of each different type did they produce?

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The next post will also feature a couple of word problems.  After that, I will write a post that explains in more detail what a "parallel institution" is, and how the Flying University Project relates to community organizing and parallel institution-building.  Stay tuned...