Question 9. Carolyn and Tom toss a coin which has a purple side and a green side. If the child gets the purple side, that child advances three steps. If the child gets the green side, that child goes back one step or stays at the starting position. Both started at the space marked with start and each tossed the coin four times. Carolyn advanced to number four and Tom advanced to number eight. How many times in total did they get the green side of the coin? We can look at this problem as a math equation. Each purple side is a plus three and each green side is a minus one. Tossing the coin four times to get to the number four, we would have to do three plus three minus one minus one which gives us four. That means that Carolyn flipped the coin and got two purple and two green sides. Next we know that Tom moved to space number eight. To get to space number eight, we will do three plus three plus three minus one which gives us eight. Now all we need to do is count up how many times we did minus one or got the green side which we have one, two, three. So the answer will be C, three.

coin toss

purple side

green side

math equation

steps calculation