THE MAGIC GOPHER
theenglishteacher on August 15th, 2008
As I’m on holiday I needed to print out some lessons, (yes I teach on holiday too!) It was a flying visit to a friend of mines house, but as I was about to leave I was shown this British Council magic gopher it’s kind of fun. How is this done I hear you ask yourself. Anyone know?
Thanks to Diane Hollis, Deal
Don’t quite see how it’s done. But there are some limits. If you take a number with two digits, we can express that in algebra as 10x + y where x is the tens digit and y is the ones. Then he says to add them together. That gives you x+y. You subtract that from your original number i.e. 10x+y-(x+y) ie 10x+y-x-y ie 9x.
So your number is always 9 times the tens digit of your original number. That limits the possibilities drastically to 9, 18, 27, 36 etc…
But how he gets the exact symbol, I don’t know.
Hehe, this is fun, it took me a few turns to figure out how it works
Greets Julia