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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.
-- submitted from IRC
High number of adults unable to do basic mathematical tasks
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 16 2018, @01:48AM (1 child)
Algebraic. Fucking. Manipulation. That's all undergrad math is, to include math majors. Get a few gems like this one, [radartutorial.eu] and practice solving (isolating) for as many variables in those equations as you can.
I don't share your gripes about multiplication tables, but definitely do where students are taught things when it would make sense to explain a higher meaning to them (your linear algebra example). We were taught complex numbers in 7th grade, but they were improperly called "imaginary numbers," and again it was just algebra with specific rules, no applications. It would have made more sense if we were given an intro to quaternions(I/Q modulation is a thing in the real-world) or just given a cartesian-style plane and taught that a complex number is "two numbers in one," much like how vectors are. And basic vector operations are also something which should be taught at a lower level.
The biggest problem with lower-level math is that it's not often taught by showing the student what the interpretation of the symbology is. For example not all classes which first teach determinants teach that you can interpret it as an area of a parallelogram -- it's just numbers to crunch. Not all trig classes teach basic vector operations, and they should, and knowledge of linear algebra or even basic matrices are required to understand the meaning of those.
Perhaps America is just unenlightened nowadays. I hear European schools are teaching students early calculus and thermodynamics so they can avoid the explosions of all those grenades and bullets refugees are tossing through their windows.
(Score: 3, Touché) by PiMuNu on Friday March 16 2018, @11:32AM
> Perhaps America is just unenlightened nowadays ... all those grenades and bullets refugees are tossing through their windows.
I'm pretty sure European high schools are safer than US ones.