Question Video: Interpreting and Solving Addition and Subtraction Word Problems Mathematics

Video Transcript

Liam has 63 blocks to build with. He used 29 blocks to build one house. He wants to build a second house with the leftover blocks. Is the number of leftover blocks bigger or smaller than 62? Do you need to add or subtract to find how many blocks he has left to build the second house? How many blocks are left to build the second house?

The question tells us that Liam has 63 blocks and he used 29. That means that Liam took 29 blocks away from the 63 that he had. To find out how many blocks are left, we need to calculate 63 take away 29.

First, we need to subtract nine from three, which we can’t do. So we need to take a 10 from the tens column and add it to the ones column. 13 take away nine is four and five take away two is three.

The number of leftover blocks is 34, which is smaller than 62. We needed to subtract to find how many blocks Liam has left to build the second house. And the number of blocks left is 34.