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'Peaches in General' printed from https://nrich.maths.org/
Obviously start by doing the original problem, that's plenty hard
enough as a first challenge if you haven't seen anything like it
before, but after that ask yourself the question:
- What things might
generalise?
Perhaps the
fraction taken
each day, or the
number of
days , or the 'plus
one more', or something else, but take
those possibilities one at a time.
If you use a spreadsheet (and there are really strong reasons for
doing that in this type of problem), what do you need to calculate
in each column of the sheet? You can have as many columns as you
want, so do simple calculations, then calculations further along
the row that use those answers, rather than complicated
calculations in single cells.
Will you make your first column a number of peaches before any
eating happens? It might be better to have the number of peaches in
the final column, making your row a calculation trail that deduces
the number at the start?