How many glasses of water does a person drink in his or her entire life?
Wallaby drinks 8 glasses of water every day. He tries to imagine how much water he is going to consume during his whole life. He gets a pen and paper, and starts solving. When he finally figures out the answer, he jumps up in surprise. Can you imagine why?
Let's find out just how much water Wallaby consumes if he drinks 8 glasses of water a day for 80 years.
First, get a pen and some paper. We are going to have to do some multiplication problems.
On your paper, draw a chart that looks like this:
Just like in the chart, fill out the square below "1 day" with "8 glasses." This shows that Wallaby drinks 8 glasses of water in a day. To solve for the next square, we need to find out how many glasses of water Wallaby drinks in a week. Let's try this out.
We know that there are 7 days in a week. So we need to find out how many glasses of water Wallaby drinks in 7 days, if each day he drinks 8 glasses.
8 glasses times 7 days equals 56 glasses (8 x 7 = 56)
Now let's put this in our table.
Try solving for the rest of the squares. Here are a few hints to help you along:
1) On average, there are 30 days in a month.
2) There are 365 days in a year.
How do you work out the number of glasses of water Wallaby drinks in 5 years? Think about this: If there are 365 days in 1 year, how many days are there in 5 years? How many days are there in 10, 50, or 80 years?
When you find out the number of glasses of water that Wallaby will drink for 80 years, I'm sure you'll jump up in surprise, too!
Now that you have figured out how many glasses of water Wallaby drinks, figure out how many glasses of water you drink. For one week keep a daily chart of how many glasses of water or other drink you drink in one week. Once you determine how many glasses you drink in a week, figure out how much you would drink in 1 year, 15 years, 25 years, and 75 years.
Ready to move on to the next lesson?
Solving Multiplication Word Problems
