Learn About Number Patterns

TenMarks teaches you how to be able to understand number patterns.

Learn About Number Patterns In this lesson, let’s learn how to identify number patterns. We are given two problems. The first one wants us to find the missing numbers and for us to identify the patterns in the series. Let’s do them one by one. Question A says that the pattern is 10, 15, 20. We have to find the missing number followed by 30 and then the next missing number. Let’s do this one first. So there are two ways to doing pattern types of problems. The first one is what we’ll do now. We’ll use something called the hundreds chart. So a hundreds chart is typically used to find patterns when the numbers are less than 100. So let’s try and see where we can place these numbers. So number 10 is right here, number 15 is here, number 20 is here, number 30 is here, etc. What can I see? If you look at what we’ve been given, number 10 is the last number on the first row, then we have the 5th number on the second row, the last number on the second row, and then we have the last number on the third row, etc. So it looks like that if I look at the pattern, we have the last number on the first row, then we have five numbers after that. It gives us 15 and then we have five more numbers after that and it gives us 20. If we follow this pattern and look at that missing number being 25 which would be 5 numbers after 20, that would be 1, add 5 more or move 5 more spaces, it gets us to 30. If I go to the next row and look at that 5th number, that would give me 35 and that’s what we’re supposed to do. So the missing number here is 25, here is 35. And again, the way that we did is by looking at the hundreds chart and just identifying that the pattern was the last digit in each row and the fifth digit in each row starting with 10. So the pattern would be 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, etc. Now let’s try the second problem. I’m going to use a black pen for this one. We can see that the pattern given to us has the number up front, then 50 then 45 then another missing number and then 35, etc. There’s another way to do this. So to solve problem B, let’s try this. I’m going to take two adjacent numbers and subtract them. 50 and then I’m going to take away 45 from them. It gives us a difference of 5, which means that the second number is 5 greater than the third number. If that’s the pattern, I should be able to solve the other ones. So for example, if this missing number has to be 5 greater than this one, that’s 50 + 5 is 55. If 45 is 5 greater than this missing number, then this must be 40. 45 – 5 gives us 40. 40, I take away 5 gives me 35, so that’s correct. 35, I take away 5, I get 30. So you notice that what I did is that we found the difference between the two adjacent numbers and we use that to find the other numbers. Of course, since this was a difference of 5, we made sure that these two have the difference of 5 and these two have a difference of 5, etc. So what we’ve learned in this lesson are two different way to identify number patterns. One is by looking at a hundred start and identifying where the numbers lay, and the second is by finding the difference between adjacent numbers or the relationship between adjacent numbers and using that to calculate the missing ones.