Sort numbers: largest to smallest
for Kindergarten

Kindergarten : Ordering numbers :
Sort numbers up to 50 from largest to smallest

In this topic you are asked to look at a mixed up list of numbers up to 50 and sort them so that the first number is the biggest, the next number is the second biggest and so on. There are 4 numbers in each list, and the numbers can be as big as 50 and as small as 1. In the first question, you have the list :

23, 3, 8, 1

Start by counting the number of digits in each number - three of them have one digit, but the first number, 23, has 2 digits. A two digit number is always bigger than a one digit number, so the 23 has to be the biggest number in that list.

Now we have three numbers left to sort. They all have one digit so we can just compare how big they are. We know that 8 is bigger than 3 or 1 so 8 is the next biggest number.

Two numbers left... one of them starts with is 3 but the other one is 1, so the 3 is bigger than the 1 and is the next number in our sorted list. So the final list of numbers sorted from biggest to smallest has to be :

23, 8, 3, 1

In another question from the topic you are asked to sort the following list from largest to smallest :

22, 29, 67, 17

So we use the same technique as last time and look for the largest number in that list. Look at the first digit of each number and you will see that one of them is a 6, and the others are smaller numbers, so that 67 has to be the biggest number.

There are two numbers in the list that start with a 2, so compare their second digit. One of them is a 2 (the 22) and the other is a 9 (the 29), so the one with the 9 (the 29) is next biggest.

The smallest number must be the one that starts with a 1, the 17. So the sorted list from largest to smallest is :

67, 29, 22, 17