Reading stem and leaf plots/dont understanding?

Question

the sleeping habits of the five animals that sleep the most in a typical day are shown in the stem and leaf plot.

hours of sleep

stem leaf

2 2 0

1 6 9 9 ____

how many animals sleep 20 hrs ?

what is the greatest number of hrs shown in the table?

Armadillos and opossums sleep the same # of hrs. the number of hrs they sleep is shown in the stem and leaf plot. how many hrs do they sleep daily?

Answer 1

The way to interpret your numbers is that the first number in each row is the "stem" and the numbers after it are the "leaves".  Since you're talking about time, the numbers would all be less than 24 (hours) so you don't have to worry about numbers being more than 2 digits long.

The first number to the left is the number in the "tens" place, and the others are the ones that could come after in the "ones" place.  For an example, your first row (2 2 0) represents the times of 22 hours (the first 2 which is the stem followed by the second 2 which is your first leaf) and 20 hours (the stem 2, and the second leaf, 0).

In your next row, the 1 is the stem, and 6, 9, and 9 are the leaves, so you combine these like how I showed you for the first row to get 3 more times.