Question Video: Comparing Lengths Mathematics • 1st Grade

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.