Leaving twelve

Resources

Leaving twelve (worksheet)

Leaving twelve (PowerPoint)

Teaching notes

This puzzle deliberately makes use of an ambiguity in the question: ‘twelve remains’ refers to the meaning of the word, rather than the number of letters.

Once students have realised this double meaning, you could lead them towards the solution by asking what common ways there are of shortening a word by one letter. Changing it from a plural to a singular is one obvious answer.

Solution

The answer is dozens – removing the final ‘s’ leaves ‘dozen’, which means 12.