Water for Schools
Menu

Math problem set Grade 5 Engineering & Design

Bramcote Water Works Leak List: A Grade 5 Repair Choice Set

Ten grade 5 problems converting quarts and pints to gallons so a fictional town's crew can rank three leaks and assign its one long-lasting repair.

Objectives

  1. Students will convert quarts and pints to gallons within the customary system.
  2. Students will find daily and weekly water loss from a stated hourly loss.
  3. Students will rank three leaks by water lost and assign repairs under a stated limit.

Vocabulary

Service line
A service line is the small pipe that connects the water main under the street to the plumbing inside one home or building. It is the last leg of the trip water makes to your tap.

Also: leak, quart, pint, clamp

Teacher overview

All ten problems come from one week in the fictional town of Bramcote, where the water crew has found three leaks and can repair only two of them before the next work order. The arc moves from converting each leak's loss into a shared unit, to daily and weekly totals, to two decisions: which two leaks to fix, and which of them gets the crew's single long-lasting repair. Later problems reuse the totals found earlier, so students should keep their answers where they can see them.

The misconception this set is designed to correct is ranking by the bare number. Told that one leak loses 12 quarts an hour and another loses 2.5 gallons an hour, most fifth graders name the first one as the bigger problem, because 12 is larger than 2.5. It is the bigger problem, but not for that reason, and the same reasoning would rank a leak losing 8 pints an hour above the 2.5-gallon leak, which is wrong. Say directly that two measurements cannot be compared until they carry the same unit, and have students write the unit beside every number they record. A second slip to watch for in problem 3: students multiply 2.5 by 24 and write 50, having multiplied by 20 and stopped. Encourage the check of 2.5 times 24 as 2.5 times 20 plus 2.5 times 4.

Bramcote Water Works Leak List: A Grade 5 Repair Choice Set — Grade 5 Engineering & Design
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Problems

The Bramcote Water Works is a fictional small utility. Last Monday its crew logged three leaks.

  • Leak A is a dripping hydrant on Kilnrow Lane. It loses 12 quarts of water each hour.
  • Leak B is a cracked service line at the school. It loses 2.5 gallons each hour.
  • Leak C is a worn spigot at the ballfield. It loses 8 pints each hour.

Every leak runs all day and all night until it is repaired. There are 4 quarts in 1 gallon and 8 pints in 1 gallon. The crew has time to repair only two leaks this week.

  1. Leak A loses 12 quarts each hour. How many gallons each hour is that?
  2. Using your answer from problem 1, how many gallons does Leak A lose in one full day of 24 hours?
  3. Leak B loses 2.5 gallons each hour. How many gallons does Leak B lose in one full day of 24 hours?
  4. Leak C loses 8 pints each hour. How many gallons each hour is that?
  5. Using your answer from problem 4, how many gallons does Leak C lose in one full day of 24 hours?
  6. Add the three daily totals. How many gallons does Bramcote lose each day while all three leaks are running?
  7. The crew can repair only two leaks this week, and it wants to save the most water. Which two leaks should it repair?
  8. How many gallons each day would those two repairs save?
  9. The repairs will be finished on Monday morning. How many gallons would they save over the next 7 days?
  10. The crew carries parts for one clamp and one new pipe section. A clamp lasts about 2 years, and a new pipe section lasts about 40 years. Bramcote's rule is that the leak losing the most water must get a repair lasting at least 10 years. Which leak should get the new pipe section?

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: 3 gallons per hour.
    There are 4 quarts in 1 gallon, so 12 quarts divided by 4 quarts per gallon equals 3 gallons.
  2. Answer: 72 gallons per day.
    3 gallons per hour times 24 hours equals 72 gallons.
  3. Answer: 60 gallons per day.
    2.5 gallons per hour times 24 hours equals 60 gallons. Check it as 2.5 times 20 equals 50, plus 2.5 times 4 equals 10, and 50 plus 10 equals 60.
  4. Answer: 1 gallon per hour.
    There are 8 pints in 1 gallon, so 8 pints divided by 8 pints per gallon equals 1 gallon.
  5. Answer: 24 gallons per day.
    1 gallon per hour times 24 hours equals 24 gallons.
  6. Answer: 156 gallons per day.
    72 plus 60 plus 24 equals 156 gallons.
  7. Answer: Leak A and Leak B.
    Leak A loses 72 gallons a day and Leak B loses 60, while Leak C loses only 24, so repairing A and B saves more water than any other pair. A student who ranked the leaks before converting the units would have picked A and C.
  8. Answer: 132 gallons per day.
    72 gallons plus 60 gallons equals 132 gallons saved each day.
  9. Answer: 924 gallons.
    132 gallons per day times 7 days equals 924 gallons. Work it as 132 times 7, which is 700 plus 210 plus 14.
  10. Answer: Leak A.
    Leak A loses the most water at 72 gallons a day, and the rule says that leak must get a repair lasting at least 10 years. A clamp lasts about 2 years, so only the new pipe section meets the rule, and it goes to Leak A. Leak B then gets the clamp.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students a conversion strip showing 4 quarts filling 1 gallon and 8 pints filling 1 gallon as drawings, and let them keep it beside their paper. Set up problems 2, 3, and 5 as multiplication sentences with the numbers already placed, so the work is the product rather than the setup. A calculator is appropriate for problem 9.

Extension

Ask these students to find how many bathtubs the three leaks together would fill in one day, using a tub volume they measure or look up, and to write a short note to the Bramcote crew arguing whether Leak C is worth a trip on its own. They should also figure out what the two repairs save over a full year of 365 days.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "leak," "quart," "pint," and "clamp" using the real containers and a picture of a pipe clamp. Post a single sentence frame students can reuse: "Leak ___ loses ___ gallons each day." Allow students to show their conversions with labeled drawings of containers, and read problem 10 aloud, since it carries the heaviest reading load in the set.

Extensions

A dripping classroom or hallway faucet can be measured directly: set a measuring cup under it for ten minutes, record what collects, and scale the result up to a day. Comparing that measurement with Leak C, the smallest leak on the Bramcote list, gives students a sense of how a loss too small to notice adds up across a town.