First Cheryl’s Birthday, Now Hannah’s Sweet
Students flooded social media this week to ridicule this tricky maths teaser about a teenage girl and her struggle with a sugary diet. Here’s how to solve it.
Hannah’s sweets maths problem perplexed students taking the Edexcel GCSE paper Photograph: Twitter/Twitter
Earlier this week this question was in the Edexcel Maths GCSE paper:
There are n sweets in a bag. 6 of the sweets are orange. The rest of the sweets are yellow.
Hannah takes a random sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet.
Hannah then takes at random another sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet.
The probability that Hannah eats two orange sweets is 1/3.
Show that n² – n – 90 = 0.
Students took to Twitter to moan about how difficult the question was.
I agree, there is something inherently comic about the question, since you start off talking about Hannah and sweets and then – BANG – all of a sudden you get a scary-looking equation.
But READ THE QUESTION. The question is not asking you to solve the equation. It is asking you to do some basic probability.
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