You might have observed that in nature, many things follow a certain pattern such as the
petals of a sunflower, the cells of a honeycomb, the grains on a maize cob, the spirals on a
pineapple and on a pine cone etc.
Can you see a pattern in each of the above given example? We can see the natural
patterns have a repetition which is not progressive. The identical petals of the sunflower are
equidistantly grown. In a honeycomb identical hexagonal shaped cells are arranged symmetrically
around each hexagonal cell. Similarly, you can find out other natural patterns in spirals of
pineapple....
You can look for some other patterns in nature. Some examples are:
(i) List of the last digits (digits in unit place) taken from the values of 4, 42
, 43
, 44
, 45
, 46
.....
is
4, 6, 4, 6, 4, 6, ......
(ii) Mary is doing problems on patterns as part of preparing for a bank exam. One of them
is “find the next two terms in the following pattern”.
1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, 22 .......
(iii) Usha applied for a job and got selected. She has been offered a job with a starting
monthly salary of D 8000, with an annual increment of D500. Her salary (in rupees) for
to 1st, 2nd, 3rd ... years will be 8000, 8500, 9000 ..... respectively.
(iv) The lengths of the rungs of a ladder decrease uniformly by 2 cm from bottom to top. The
bottom rung is 45 cm in length. The lengths (in cm) of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, .... 8th rung from
the bottom to the top are 45, 43, 41, 39, 37, 35, 33, 31 respectively.
Can you see any relationship between the terms in the pattern of numbers written above?
Pattern given in example (i) has a relation of two numbers one after the other i.e. 4 and
6 are repeating alternatively.