Linguistic Challenges in mathematical word problems shown in the following problems

1. When Stella got on the bus, she counted all the children on the bus.

At the next stop, 6 children got off the bus.

The number sentence below shows how many children were still on the bus.

?–6=4

How many children were on the bus when Stella got on it?

A. 2

B. 3

C. 10

D. 11

This question is temporal sequence

The person solving this problem needs to figure out if they are using addition or subtraction to figure
out the unknown. In this problem a lot is already set up and states that Stella starts off counting all of
the children on the bus, which is 10 children all together which would mean that you would need to
add 6 + 4= 10. 10 is the unknown number which would help explain that when 6 students got off the
bus that there were 4 left on it.

In this problem the number sentence is already set up but what needs to be looked at is the verb that
is indicating (were still on the bus) that after the = sign it is going to be less which I highlighted in bold.
So in order to solve this problem that student needs to add 6+4 to find out the unknown number to
make the sentence complete. The fact that there are answers given the student can also use the
numbers given in the answer key to figure out which would make the most sense for the number
sentence.

1. Ms. Levett planted 4 sunflower seeds in her front yard and 5 sunflower seeds in her back yard.
 She has 6 sunflower seeds left.

In the answer box below, write the total number of sunflower seeds that Ms. Levett had when
she started planting.

Answer

15 - 9 = 6

2. Ms. Levett planted 4 sunflower seeds in her front yard and 5 sunflower seeds in her back yard.
She has 6 sunflower seeds left.

In the answer box below, write the total number of sunflower seeds that Ms. Levett had when
she started planting.

This is a long dense noun group identifying the head.

Bold meaning the Pre modifier

Itlaic meaning Head noun
Underlined meaning Post modifier

First the student needs to read the sentence carefully to figure out what the problem is asking
for. For this problem the student needs to see that they need to figure out the total number of
sunflower seeds that the lady had when she first started planting.

The student would need to add 4+5=9

Knowing that there were definitely 9 seeds that were planted when you combine the front
and the back of the yard.
The next part of the question states that there are 6 sunflower seeds left over. Knowing that
they are left over means that they would be the answer after the equal sign and we are using
subtraction because we are trying to figure out the post modifier with is what she had when
she first started planting.

? – 9 =6

Now in order to find the unknown if we know that 6 seeds were left over and 9 were already
planted then we would need to add 9+6= 15

Then the unknown number would be 15 and the answer would be as follows

15 - 9 = 6