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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: 4, Interesting) by IndigoFreak on Friday March 16 2018, @03:06AM (11 children)
I'm not sure its education. I bet most high school students could do this. It's just a skill people lose. And while they should not lose it, they just don't care enough.
Of course you could argue that the failure was to ingrain in them the ability to realize simple math is a valuable skill...but I'd still disagree. Our society makes it too
easy to forget what little education you do get. We have it way too easy in the first world.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday March 16 2018, @06:52AM (5 children)
One easy way to make people train their basic calculation abilities would be if at the shop they have to calculate the amount they will have to pay, and then they get told the true amount, but they have to pay the true price plus the absolute difference between both values (so they get to pay more both if they say too much, and if they say too little).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:47AM
> train their basic calculation abilities
Easy to game this one. Pay for each item individually (with cash), takes longer but won't incur any penalty for adding mistakes.
(Score: 3, Touché) by deimtee on Friday March 16 2018, @10:55AM (2 children)
Do you want to try explaining that system to people who can't work out that one third of $3.15 is $1.05 ?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @01:06PM
Well, they question said how much a liter costs, and asks how much 1/3rd of a liter costs. Which is a horribly stupid question, because 1/3rd of a liter would probably cost around $1.50 or even around $2 in reality.
If you have a mathematics question, feel you have to wrap it in "everyday context" and then make it so that the "correct" answer is in complete contradiction to reality, why should I think someone is dumb because they don't give the idiotic, completely bogus answer the idiot asking was expecting?
Sometimes, not getting the right answer means the person asking is the idiot, not the one being asked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @02:13PM
Sure, the government does shit like this everyday, they just call it a Tax. You thing his scheme is convoluted compared to non linear progression of income tax, with hidden deductions sprinkled in all over the place?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @12:01PM
Great. Longer line of people standing before you at any given time.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday March 16 2018, @11:01AM (4 children)
I had a graduate student - i.e. studying for a PhD, with a first class degree from a world-leading university - who could not do this sort of calculation in her head (she could with a calculator). I think it was trendy in the 90s not to teach arithmetic in the UK.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @02:51PM (3 children)
Honestly, I think that in a world where pretty much everyone is carrying a calculator with them at all times, being able to do arithmetic in your head, or even on paper, is a questionable skill. I mean sure, I find it handy, but there's very few times when it matters that I couldn't just use my phone. Heck, when it matters I probably use my phone anyway because it's more convenient than finding pencil and paper, and less error-prone than doing it completely in my head.
Knowing how to *use* math on the other hand is an extremely valuable skill. I could get behind a push to teach grade-school arithmetic using primarily calculators and word problems. A hell of a lot more useful than all this modern nonsense in the US teaching various "tricks" and "shortcuts" for performing arithmetic. What's the point in teaching a shortcut that obscures the fundamental principles involved? Shortcuts are something you teach to someone who needs a faster way to perform repetitive tasks - and the only repetitive tasks students perform are the very exercises that are supposed to be helping them learn something more broadly useful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @07:59PM (1 child)
I don't know where you went to school, but we didn't learn tricks or shortcuts, and weren't allowed to use calculators except where the class was about "how to use a graphing calculator to do what you learned to do last year by hand" and I imagine calculus but I never took that. The calculator is the #1 reason people can't do math and don't understand or remember it. Writing by hand or using your brain drills stuff into your memory, punching numbers just goes through the motions.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @08:57PM
Neither did I, but have you looked at any of the "new math" stuff? It's almost all tricks and shortcuts, many of which are of very dubious utility without pencil and paper, and most of which do nothing to explain the fundamental principles which underlie them. Go ahead, try to multiply two three-digit numbers using the intersecting lines methods in your head, you'll need exceptionally stable visualization skills. Meanwhile I've looked through several books and not one explained WHY or HOW the method works, I had to work that out myself. Not exactly rocket science, but I doubt I could have done it without already having a sound understanding what multiplication fundamentally is. So it teaches kids a dubious shortcut that's (maybe) easier to get right on paper, but without any context as to why it actually works, or developing any skills that will be useful for more advanced math, or anything else really.
Meanwhile most calculators don't do math, only arithmetic. Math is a language, an extremely precise artificial one, and the most important part of math for the average user is being able to translate real-world problems into a mathematical representation - e.g. turning the given question into $3.15 / 3 = ?. Once you've done that the answer is within easy reach of anyone who knows how to perform the calculation, regardless of the method used. Heck, we could probably condense several years worth of rote memorization into one year of concepts and calculator training, and then advance into basic algebra and start teaching them real math. Algebra is easy - just a bunch of little logic puzzles, and way easier than trying to perform calculations correctly. Advanced stuff gets a lot more complicated, but you've got to get pretty far along before you hit anything that takes the sort of sustained rigorous precision required for long division, or even multiplying two two-digit numbers.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 19 2018, @09:56AM
> I mean sure, I find it handy, but there's very few times when it matters that I couldn't just use my phone.
Nonsense. I spend a lot of time reviewing work of post-docs and students in meetings. Stupid example:
Someone puts a slide up showing that they have 18 noise triggers per 200 data triggers, then the next slide they show 1 % purity. I need to be able to catch that and interrogate them - where did the other 9 % go? Usually they didn't notice and made a typo/bad assumption somewhere.
Anyone doing engineering/science needs to be able to do that as part of their job.