Earlier this month, mathematics was on the agenda, with the government worried that most people find maths boring, embarrassing, or just plain silly.
Schools are underperforming; specialist maths teachers are to be trained and sent in to help primary schools; adults can’t do simple algebra, and so on..
This week, the focus turns to food, and the “5 a day” guidelines. People are struggling to come to terms with the rules for 5 a day - let’s face it, it sounds pretty simple when you hear phrases like “five portions of fruit or veg a day”, but the Nanny Coach was himself alarmed to find out only a week or so ago that those potatoes he’s been eating all these years counted as neither veg, nor fruit in this context.
People it seems, find vegetables boring, embarassing, and just plain silly.
No wonder, then, that’s it’s all so confusing. With all this Nannying we don’t know whether to improve our maths literacy, or our diets.
Never fear though, the Coach is here to help. He’s already a whizz at maths, and today he’s been reading up on what actually counts towards your daily fruit and veg intake. Frankly, any dietary advice that requires smallprint makes you wonder, but anyway…
To help make both topics less boring/emparrassing/silly, and help improve your knowledge of each, I give you:-
Fruit and Veg Algebra
Based on the rules (here) answer the following questions. Answers are below.
1. A simple one for starters. Oranges and tomatoes:-
2. Satsumas and cherry tomatoes are a bit trickier:-
3. Not strictly a maths questions, but I thought I’d stick this one in while we’re at it:-
4. But I digress, back to the maths:-
one orange = a glass of orange juice
therefore, from question 1:
one glass of orange juice = 1
5 x glasses of orange juice = ?
5. Some sumultaneous equations:-
6. How about?
7. Percentages are always tricky:-
Answers
If all these pictures of different fruits haven’t given you the urge to pop down the local gambling parlour and play on the fruit machines by now, here are the answers.
1. This one is straightforward. Each fruit counts 1 towards your daily f&v, hence the answer is 2.
2. Don’t be put off by the fact that satsumas look like small oranges, or that a cherry tomato is a type of tomato.
One satsuma = 1/2 of one of your daily f&v, and a cherry tomato counts towards 1/7 of a daily f&v.
1/2 + 1/7 = 9/14 (or approximately 0.64 of a daily fruit and veg portion).
3. The correct answer, according to the guidelines of the quiz is that tomato counts as a vegetable. I don’t make the rules.
4. The answer is 1. Any number of glasses of orange juice only counts towards 1 of your fruit and veg a day.
Neither can you mix several glasses of several different type of fruit juice, and count them as more than 1. In the advanced “A level” test next week, I’ll be testing you on mixing several glasses of those “lots of different kinds of fruit in one juice drink” drinks.
5. Give yourself a point for the following answer, but only if you showed your workings in full.
6. This is a trick question. You aren’t actually given enough information in the question to work this out, even if you did manage to work out that’s a blackberry in the picture.
However, according to the guidelines, and assuming we’re not talking some kind of giant mutant blackberry, you can assume that “2 or more” blackberries represent a single portion.
Therefore, award yourself a point if you answered “anywhere between not quite zero portions, and 3 and a half portions of f&v”.
There is a further guideline for such portions, again not useful to answer the question, but in general “a handful” of small fruit can be considered one portion. Or as the new 5-a-Day spokesperson Melinda Messenger would put it, more than a handful is a waste.
Vegetable Tzar, Melinda Messenger - Melons for everyone
7. The correct answer is 20%
Please note, however that if you used the term “what percentage of 100%..” in any normal branch of mathematics, you would usually not make grammatical sense. This is however a combination of 2 governmental edicts, so nonsense is allowed in this instance.
