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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: 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.