Video Transcript
We have two groups of coins as
shown in the picture, two-pence coins and 10-pence coins. Which group has more coins? Which group has more money?
We’re told that we have two groups
of coins. Let’s spend a moment to look at
them. The first group is labeled
two-pence coins. Do you know why this is? Well, each of the coins in this
group is the same, and they’re all worth two pence. Perhaps you remember that by the
way that these coins look or by the way that it says at the top of each coin two
pence. Now, our second group is a little
bit shorter, isn’t it? There are less coins in this group,
and this group is labeled 10-pence coins. Each of the coins in this group is
worth 10 pence. And again, perhaps you knew this
already. They’re silver colored, they’re
circular, and if you look really closely, you’ll be able to make out the words 10
pence at the top of each coin.
So we’ve been given these two
groups of coins to look at. Let’s take a look at the questions
that we need to answer. But perhaps you notice when we very
first read these questions, they do sound quite similar. Which group has more coins? Which group has more money? That’s the same thing, isn’t
it? Let’s begin with the first
question, which group has more coins? Now, when we ask this, what we’re
talking about is how many bits of metal are there in this group. How many actual coins are
there? We’re not worried about what each
one is worth, what their value is. We’re just worried about how many
there are. And as we’ve said already, the line
of 10-pence coins looks a little bit shorter, doesn’t it, than the line of two-pence
coins. Perhaps, we’d better count each
group just to be safe.
In the group of two-pence coins, we
can see one, two, three, four, five, six coins altogether. And in the group of 10-pence coins,
there are one, two, three, four coins altogether. It’s just like we thought. The group that has more coins is
the group of two-pence coins, isn’t it? In the second question, we’re asked
which group has more money? You might think to yourself, well,
we’ve just seen which group has more coins, and that’s the group of two-pence
coins. So surely this group has more
money. More coins means more money,
doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t because what this
question is asking us is which group is worth the most, and this depends on what
sort of coins we’re looking at. In the first group, all of the
coins are worth two pence each, so we can skip count in twos to find the total, two,
four, six, eight, 10, 12. The two-pence coins altogether are
worth 12 pence.
Now, if we stop and think about
this, we can probably answer the question now. We know that each of the coins in
the second group are worth 10 pence, and we have four coins in the second group,
four lots of 10 pence. All those two-pence coins in the
first group only added up to 12 pence. Do you think the second group is
going to add up to more than 12 pence? I think so, don’t you, especially
as each coin is worth 10 pence already. But there’s only one way to find
out, and that’s to skip count in 10s, 10, 20.
Well, we’re already more than 12,
aren’t way? So we know that this group has more
money. Let’s carry on counting from 20,
30, 40. Our 10-pence coins are worth 40
pence altogether. This question has taught us
something interesting about coins. Just because we have more coins
doesn’t always mean that we have more money. It depends on what our coins are
worth. The group that had more coins in
our question was the group of two-pence coins. But when we counted the value of
each group, we found that the group that had more money was the group of 10-pence
coins.
