Akeelah and the Bee
Learning New Words/Page 1 of 3

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Learning New Words

In the film, Dr. Larabee gave Akeelah several shoe boxes of cards containing about 5,000 words that she needed to learn before the National Spelling Bee Championship.

1.Suppose Akeelah had 3 months to learn the words.

a.Find the number of words she needs to learn, on average, each day for those 3 months.

b.Does that number seem reasonable to you? Explain.

c.Suppose you were preparing for the National Spelling Bee. Determine the number of new words you think you could learn each day, and the number of old words you need to review each day. Based on these numbers, how many days would you need in order to learn and review the 5,000 words in the shoe boxes?

2.Suppose a contestant can learn 10 new words each day to mastery, so that the words do not require review.

a.Write an equation that gives the number of words learned, w, after studying d days.

b.How many words would a contestant learn in 6 months?

c.For the spelling contest, there is a consolidated word list containing 23,000 words. Many contestants learn all of these words. At the rate of 10 words per day, how long would it take to learn all the words on this list?

d.Suppose a contestant only had a year to learn all 23,000 words on the consolidated list. About how many words need to be learned each month? Each day?

e.According to a Public Broadcasting Station interview, Webster’s unabridged dictionary has 475,000 words. Compare the length of time needed to learn these words with the time needed to learn the words on the consolidated word list.

3.Suppose there are 3 spelling bee contestants. Cassandra learns 10 words per day, Russell learns 25 words per day, and Syril learns 35 words per day.

a.Write an equation for each contestant that gives the number of words learned, w, after d days.

b.Graph the 3 equations in Question 3a.

c.Compare the graphs for the words learned after d days.

4.A new speller, Preston, starts training, having already learned 5,000 words. Preston learns 35 new words per day.

a.Write an equation that shows the number of words, w, Preston has learned after d days.

b.Graph the equation for Preston’s number of words.

c.Compare a graph of the number of words learned by Preston to a graph of the number of words learned by Syril after d days.

May be copied for classroom use. © 2009 by Michaele F. Chappell and Denisse R. Thompson from Math, Culture, and Popular Media (Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH).