Video Transcript
The blue pencil is longer than the
orange pencil. The orange pencil is longer than
the green pencil. Which pencil is longest?
In this question, we’re given two
statements where pencils are compared with each other. There are three different pencils
altogether. There’s a blue one, an orange one,
and a green one. And we’re asked, which of these
pencils is the longest? So we need to compare these three
pencils together. But none of the sentences and none
of the pictures show all three pencils at the same time. They only compare two pencils at a
time. So we need to use the facts that
we’re given to try to work out which pencil is longest.
Our first fact, and the picture
underneath it, tells us that the blue pencil is longer than the orange pencil. To help us show this fact, perhaps,
we could draw a line like this. We could put things that are
shorter towards the left of the line and things that are longer towards the right of
the line. To show that the blue pencil is
longer than the orange pencil, we could put a blue and an orange counter on our
line. Because the blue pencil is longer,
we’ve put the blue counter on the right of the orange one. In our second sentence, the blue
pencil isn’t mentioned at all.
This time, the green pencil is
compared with the orange pencil. And we’re told that the orange
pencil is longer than the green pencil. In other words, the green pencil is
shorter than the orange pencil. And we can see that from the
picture. Because the green pencil is
shorter, we’re going to have to put a green counter to the left of the orange
counter on our line. If we look at our line, we can see
that the blue pencil is the longest. The blue pencil is longer than the
orange pencil, which is longer than the green pencil. The longest pencil is blue.