En cours d’anglais, nous abordons des problèmes mathématiques parfois. Il est évident que ce qui intéresse le professeur d’anglais, ce n’est pas le résultat en lui-même mais l’explication de la démarche qui permet d’arriver à un résultat. L’objectif pour l’élève, c’est d’être capable de lister les étapes dans son raisonnement, en utilisant le vocabulaire approprié et les mots connecteurs pour exprimer la logique de sa pensée.

Vous trouverez ci-dessous un exemple :

A man has a square garden. It takes him four minutes to walk around the garden twice. If it takes him five seconds to walk ten metres, how long is one side of his garden ?

First, we calculate the length of time the man needs to walk around his garden once. To do this, we divide four minutes by two and we learn that he needs two minutes to walk around his garden once.

Then, we divide the time of two minutes by four to discover the length of time he needs to walk along one side of his square garden. We learn that he needs 30 seconds to walk along one side of his garden.

After this, we can calculate the length of his garden because we know that it takes him five seconds to walk ten metres, so  because he can complete one side of his garden in thirty seconds, we need to calculate his speed. We divide 30 seconds by five seconds (because this is his speed of walking ten metres) and we arrive at a result of twelve. Finally we multiply ten metres by twelve to see how far he can walk in thirty seconds. The result is one hundred and twenty, so finally we conclude that the length of one side of his garden is one hundred and twenty metres long.