I need a little help with ds's maths homework please

[CMOTDibbler]

One of the questions in his mental maths workbook is 'what is the value of 7 in 17'. He doesn't know what it means, and I have no idea either. Can anyone help me!

I would think it means 7, or possibly they want the answer 'units'. So he knows the place value and isn't thinking it means 70 or 700.

What year? Is it not just 7 units?

Might the 7 be the units, and the 1 the tens? Ask him if that sounds familiar.

It means 7 (or might want "7 units"). If the question were "what is the value of 1 in 17" the answer would be 10.

Yep it is place value - if it was asking the value of the 1 the answer would be 10, so the answer is 7 or 7 units x

Yes it's '7 units', but if he doesn't know the answer then I'd leave it so the teacher knows he doesn't understand

I thought the answer might be units, but didn't want to prompt too much as I sometimes go off on the wrong tangent and cause confusion.

Thank you all

The answer is either '7 units' or I would accept just '7' for that is what it is.

It's unusual to have a question like this in isolation. Normally it would be of the form:

What is the value of the 7 in the numbers a) 764 b) 8375 c) 72 d) 17 e) 7 892? (Difficulty of numbers depending on age and ability, of course. So '7' as the answer to parts d) and e) would be perfectly acceptable and would show that the concept has been understood, provided the others are correct. By the way, the answers could be written in digits or words, so the following answers are all equivalent and correct for part a) for example:

'700' '7 hundred' 'seven hundred'

Later there will be decimals such as 8.57 and 0.734 and the answer to '8.57' could be written as 0.07, 7 hundredths, seven hundredths or 7/100