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Suppose, a litre of cola costs US$3.15. If you buy one third of a litre of cola, how much would you pay?
The above may seem like a rather basic question. Something that you would perhaps expect the vast majority of adults to be able to answer? Particularly if they are allowed to use a calculator.
Unfortunately, the reality is that a large number of adults across the world struggle with even such basic financial tasks (the correct answer is US$1.05, by the way).
[...] In many other countries, the situation is even worse. Four in every ten adults in places like England, Canada, Spain and the US can't make this straightforward calculation – even when they had a calculator to hand. Similarly, less than half of adults in places like Chile, Turkey and South Korea can get the right answer.
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High number of adults unable to do basic mathematical tasks
(Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 16 2018, @01:06AM (1 child)
Well, like all skills, they get dull if you don't use them on a regular basis.
I found this out the hard way during job interviews. I recognized the submission department formula instantly as the arc-length formula and can do your basic exponential/logistic-curve linear homogenous differential equations and take your partitioned-box partial-derivative optimizations. I can do proofs by induction and find closed-forms of recurrence relations (except for that annoying Fibonacci one, which I rote-memorized). But during job interviews I had to find simple parallel resistances without a calculator and choked ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @02:59AM
Really? That one is about as simple as they get.
Add the reciprocals and reciprocate that.
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