Students have the opportunity to create and interpret data from simple daily questions.

This real world problem is appropriate for mental mathematics and students should be encouraged to think through the solution mentally.

In this task students are asked to write an equation to solve a real-world problem. There are two natural approaches to this task. In the first approach, students have to notice that even though there is one variable, namely the number of firefighters, it is used in two different places. In the other approach, students can find the total cost per firefighter and then write the equation.

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Mathematicians often argue that anything which can be represented numerically or algebraically can also be represented geometrically. This is perhaps true even to the extent that simple numeric calculations can be demonstrated geometrically. This example illustrates one such geometric process of addition. This resource is from PUMAS - Practical Uses of Math and Science - a collection of brief examples created by scientists and engineers showing how math and science topics taught in K-12 classes have real world applications.

“When will we ever use this in the real world?”
Real world math examples and solutions from the University of Waterloo.

While not a full-blown modeling problem, this task does address some aspects of modeling as described in Standard for Mathematical Practice 4. Also, students often think that time must always be the independent variable, and so may need some help understanding that one chooses the independent and dependent variable based on the way one wants to view a situation.

This task can be used as a quick assessment to see if students can make sense of a graph in the context of a real world situation. Students also have to pay attention to the scale on the vertical axis to find the correct match.

This problem provides an opportunity to experiment with modeling real data. Populations are often modeled with exponential functions and in this particular case we see that, over the last 200 years, the rate of population growth accelerated rapidly, reaching a peak a little after the middle of the 20th century and now it is slowing down.

The purpose of this task is for students to apply their knowledge of integers in a real-world context.

In this task students use linear equations to solve a real world problem.

The first two parts of this task ask students to interpret the meaning of signed numbers and reason based on that meaning in a context where the meaning of zero is already given by convention.

This tasks is an example of a mathematical modeling problem (SMP 4) and it also illustrates SMP 1 (Making sense of a problem). Students are only told that there are two ingredients in the pasta and they have a picture of the box. It might even be better to just show the picture of the box, or to bring in the box and ask the students to pose the question themselves.

The purpose of this task is to give students an opportunity to explore various aspects of exponential models (e.g., distinguishing between constant absolute growth and constant relative growth, solving equations using logarithms, applying compound interest formulas) in the context of a real world problem with ties to developing financial literacy skills.

In this task students use ratio and rate reasoning to solve the real-world problem of a runners rate and distance.

In this challenging instructional task students relate addition and subtraction problems to money and to situations and goals related to saving money.

There are a couple of ways to solve this real world word problem.