Bob lives 2km away from Alice and the school is 1km away from Bob. Alice sets off to meet Bob at 8am and she meets him at 8:15 and they carry on walking at the same pace. School starts at 8:20. Do they get to school on time? How early/late are they?

Many pupils struggle when maths questions that are given in a very wordy format. I feel these types of questions can be the most useful in testing mathematical concepts that the pupils have picked up in lessons and developing their problem solving skills.
This is a question which has a few ways of giving you the right answer and it requires some thought.
I will illustrate one possible way of answering the question:
- It takes Alice 15 minutes to walk 2km to meet Bob. Using this information and converting the units to seconds and meters, we get that she walks at a pace of 2.2m/s (1dp)
- When she picks up Bob, they both have to walk 1km to get to school. Since we know their walking speed is 2.2m/s we find that it takes 1000/2.2 = 454.5s to get to school.
- Converting 454.5 seconds to minutes gives us 7.6 minutes
- Since they only have 5 minutes to get to School from Bobs house and it takes them 7.6 minutes then they do not get to school on time.
- They are late by 2.6 minutes