Kangaroo Olympiad

Five BRGS pupils recently proved themselves to be among the best young mathematicians in the United Kingdom.

Jason and Joseph from Year 9 were invited to sit the Intermediate Mathematical Olympiad Cayley Paper as a result of their excellent performance in the individual challenge in February.

This paper requires full written solutions to extended problems and both boys did exceptionally well to achieve a Distinction certificate.

 

One of their questions was:

In the expression below, three of the + signs are changed into – signs so that the expression is equal to 100. In how many ways can this be done?

0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 + 13 + 14 + 15 + 16 + 17 + 18 + 19 + 20

Year 10 pupil Paul sat the Mathematical Olympiad Hamilton Paper after also excelling in the individual challenge paper.

He achieved a Merit certificate on what was an extremely difficult paper, as shown by the following question Paul had to attempt:

The positive integers m and n satisfy the equation 20m + 18n = 2018. How many possible values of m are there?

Two other pupils, William and Zaynah, were invited to sit the Intermediate Pink Kangaroo paper on which they achieved a Qualification certificate.

This is a multiple-choice paper sat by those pupils who just missed out on qualifying for the Olympiad and around 5,000 pupils sat this paper nationally.

One of the questions was:

The lengths of two sides of a triangle are 5cm and 2cm. The length of the third side in cm is an odd integer. What is the length of the third side?

A  1cm                        B  3cm                        C  5cm                        D  7cm                        E  9cm

Maths teacher Mr Wilbraham, who organises the Challenge, said: “The individual challenges are tough papers, but these follow-on rounds are significantly harder.

“We mainly enter Year 10 for the Intermediate papers, but Jason and Joseph have done so well in the Junior papers in the past that we wanted to give them the chance to try out something more difficult.

“As expected, they achieved among the highest marks on the Intermediate papers and then went on to perform really well on the Olympiad papers.

“Both of them scored full marks on four questions, which is really impressive given the Maths required to answer them and the fact they have to start each question without multiple-choice answers or much in the way of guidance.

“Paul’s paper was a higher level to the Cayley and he also did really well to achieve a Merit certificate, which adds to that he received in Year 8.

“We are really proud of all the pupils’ achievements, especially as the questions test many aspects of Maths outside the normal curriculum.

“We hope taking these papers and the subsequent achievements will help the pupils when they see more challenging questions in their GCSE course.”