Solving Two-Step Multiplication Word Problems

Two-step word problems can be difficult to solve as the student needs to work out what should be solved first and then determining and solving both steps. Most two-step word problems that involve multiplication have a multiplication step and an addition or subtraction step.

The easiest way to solve these problems is visually with bar charts to aid the student.

Let’s start with an example that involved a multiplication step and a subtraction step.

In this example, the multiplication step comes first and the subtraction step second.

A girl has 7 lollipops and she has 5 times as many candies. How many more candies than lollipops does she have?

You’ll have to start by working out how many candies she has. She has 5 x 7 as many candies. Here’s what that looks like in a bar diagram:

Now we can see how many more candies she has than lollipops. It’s this part:

She has 35 candies and 7 lollipops. So she has 35 – 7 = 28 more candies than lollipops.

Here’s an example of multiplication as a first step and addition as a second step.

There are 9 red apples. There are three times as many green apples. How many apples are there altogether?

So we know we have 9 red apples and that there are 3 times as many green apples. Here’s how that looks in a bar chart:

9 x 3 = 27, so there are 27 green apples. So in total we have 27 + 9 apples, which comes to 36 apples altogether.

If you are looking for some multiplication word problems you’ll find them in our free math worksheet center. Here are the multiplication word problem worksheets for grade 3, grade 4 and grade 5.