On Wednesday the 28th of September the SMAC maths competition was held at Southland Girls’ High after being cancelled for the past 2 years.

Schools from all over Southland enter this competition. Teams have just 20 minutes to answer as many mathematical questions as they can.

At Year 9 there were 3 teams entered. The best performing team finished a credible 7th out of 20 teams, just 3 questions behind the team that got third.

The year 10 team comprising Olivia Wilson, Lucas Gill, Charlie Roff and Rosie Paterson were outstanding, coming in first place. They answered 27 questions in 20 minutes, this was 9 more than the second placed team. This is a fantastic result and all 4 team members can be proud of their achievement. They each won a Casio graphics calculator valued at over $150.

Here are a couple of questions that the students had to answer:

From a class of 30 students: Two-thirds have read all the Harry Potter books, while four-fifths have seen all the Harry Potter movies. Four students have neither read the books nor seen the movies.  How many have done both?

If all the whole numbers from 1 to 1000 are printed, how many times will the digit 5 appear?