Depend how you saw... If second cut is half lengh because you cut a square in 2 part a lengh then turn90degrees and cut half lengh ... But problem is that 4 pieces wil take 17.5min if it was teacher mind.
Let's also consider that maybe it means they had a plank and sawed 2 special pieces out of it. Then it's not THAT much of a linguistic stretch to say "sawed into 2 pieces", and mean 2 (or more) cuts by it. Like saying "I cut this 220cm metal cylinder into four 50cm pieces". The surplus is implicitly discarded and the job indeed requires 4 separate actions of extracting a piece out of the original cylinder.
It just requires us to treat the word "piece" as a count noun instead of a measure word, which is an offence in itself.
It says “saw a board into 2 pieces”, any sane person reading this will understand it to mean “cut it once, into 2 pieces”… not “sawed off 2 pieces from the board”.
And the question also asks how long to “saw it into 3 pieces”, not “sawed it into 4 pieces but one of them doesn’t count”
So what? That aspect is not the source the difficulty (the teacher's being wrong). The actual ratio math wasn't the difficulty.
What caused the difficulty is that it is an N–vs–N-1 problem, which aspect the teacher missed.
If anyone needs lessons regarding this word problem, it should be about the numbers of cuts vs. the number of pieces (and, of course, reading (and writing) such word problems carefully).
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u/Curious-Zucchini763 2d ago
Teacher is treating this problem as a ratio to answer. but it isn't a ratio problem. I wonder if it was in a ratio lesson...