Biggest & smallest number
for 1st grade

1st grade : Comparing numbers :
Find the biggest & smallest numbers (20 to 100)

In this topic you are asked to decide which number is the smallest and which is the biggest from a group of numbers. There are 6 numbers in each group, and each number is between 20 and 100. In the first question, you have the following group of numbers :

33, 60, 79, 54, 23, 65

Start by looking at the first digit of each number - they are 3, 6, 7, 5, 2 and 6. So, if two numbers have the same number of digits, then the number with the smaller first digit is the smaller number. We can see that we have a number with a first digit of 2, the number 23, and that the other numbers have bigger first digits so that number starting with 2 has to be the smallest number in the group.

Looking for the largest number, we can see that one of the numbers, 79, starts with 7, and there are no numbers starting with digits greater than 7, so in this group the smallest and biggest numbers are :

Smallest and biggest numbers = 23 and 79

In another question from the topic you are asked to find the smallest and biggest numbers from the following group of numbers :

45, 33, 31, 48, 46, 32

So we use the same technique as last time and look at the first digit of each number in that list. You will see that three of them have 3 as a first digit and three of them have 4, so one of those starting with a 3 must be the smallest number and one of those starting with a 4 must be the biggest number in the group.

There are three numbers in the list that start with a 3, so compare their second digit. They are 3, 1 and 2. We know that 1 is smaller than 2 or 3 so the smallest number in the list has to be 31.

We can follow a similar logic to find the biggest number from those numbers with a first digit of 4. So we can say that in this group the smallest and biggest numbers are :

Smallest and biggest numbers = 31 and 48