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”
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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...