Video Transcript
Each flower in Charlotte’s window
box needs one square unit of space to grow. How many flowers will fit in the
window box?
This question describes Charlotte
who has a window box, one of those containers that you sometimes see outside
people’s windows where they grow flowers. Now, there are only so many flowers
that you can grow in a window box, depends how big it is. And we’re told that each flower in
Charlotte’s window box needs one square unit of space to grow. Each flower that Charlotte wants to
grow is going to need its own space. We’re given a diagram that shows
what this means. We’ve got a square that is one unit
tall and one unit wide. It’s one square unit. Now, we’re asked, how many flowers
will fit in the window box? In other words, how many flowers
will fit in the space inside the window box?
This word space is important. We saw it in our first
sentence. It tells us really that this
question is all about area. We know that the area of a 2D shape
is the space inside it. Now we need to be a little bit
careful with this question because a window box in real life isn’t a flat shape. It’s a box, a cuboid without a
lid. That’s where all the flowers go,
but we can see a picture of our window box that is a 2D shape. We could think of this as showing a
bird’s-eye view of our window box, a plan of what it might look like from above. That’s why we can show it as a
rectangle. And that’s why we can start
thinking about area.
We can see that this rectangle is
made up of several squares. They’re square units. And we know from what we’ve read
already that each flower that Charlotte wants to grow is going to need one square
unit of space. To find out how many flowers are
going to fit in the window box, we’re going to need to count the square units. There are four squares across the
top row, then another four, and four along the bottom. We could say the area of this plan
of our window box is 12 square units. And because each of these 12 square
units is just enough space to fit one flower in it, we know the number of flowers
that are going to fit in Charlotte’s window box is 12.
