Who was listening to the news this morning?

Ha, got those much quicker than I thought I would - working as a developer does seem to be having some effects on my awful maths!
 
Archy said:
Scary that such a high percentage of adults are reported to have terrible maths skills! I'm certainly no mathematician but didnt struggle with any.
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I work with someone who literally cannot subtract €8 from €10 so I can well believe it.

We've had to start testing peoples mathematical ability when they apply for a simple cashiers job.
 
I have no idea what equivalent fractions are and have no reason to know either. I hate it when not knowing something on the GCSE syllabus that's irrelevant knowledge in 99% of careers/walks of life supposedly makes you less intelligent than an 11 year old.
 
Russinating said:
I have no idea what equivalent fractions are and have no reason to know either. I hate it when not knowing something on the GCSE syllabus that's irrelevant knowledge in 99% of careers/walks of life supposedly makes you less intelligent than an 11 year old.
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the other thing that annoys me is, the 11 year old has just learnt this at school. ask them the same questions 2 or 3 years after leaving education and I bet they will get it wrong too.
im pretty sure if you sat a 30+ year old down with an 11 year old for the same amount of time, learning the same stuff, then asked the questions, then both ages would probably get very similar results. saying that though, the questions were easy.
 
Russinating said:
I have no idea what equivalent fractions are and have no reason to know either. I hate it when not knowing something on the GCSE syllabus that's irrelevant knowledge in 99% of careers/walks of life supposedly makes you less intelligent than an 11 year old.
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Not that it matters, but I'm fairly surprised you never got around to learning that at school!

You simple need to look for the lowest common denominator between the two, recalculate the fractions in light of this and make sure the numerator is equal.

In the above example, the lowest common denominator between 2/3 and 10/15 is 15. The next step is to multiple the numerator of the first fraction (2) by the amount of times 3 fits into 15 (5). Well, that's right but it looks horrible writing it down :p

Everyone got all up in arms about the maths equation in my signature last year. Anyone who has any knowledge of applied maths will put anything after a '/' or a divide sign (which you don't use unless you are 10 years old) as being a denominator, yet using technical GCSE bidmas/bodmas bumf you get a different answer. Ultimate maths troll :p
 
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I'd say generally computer geeks are intelligent folk, so I would expect most on this forum to find those easy.

If you went on an Xbox only forum or something like that I think you'd find a different response.
 
Well it shows how out of practice I am, I sat looking at the first question for a couple of mins, then facepalmed remembered how to use fractions and had all the questions correctly answered in less time than it had taken for it to click.

Jcb33.
 
Nitefly said:
Not that it matters, but I'm fairly surprised you never got around to learning that at school!

You simple need to look for the lowest common denominator between the two, recalculate the fractions in light of this and make sure the numerator is equal.

In the above example, the lowest common denominator between 2/3 and 10/15 is 15. The next step is to multiple the numerator of the first fraction (2) by the amount of times 3 fits into 15 (5). Well, that's right but it looks horrible writing it down :p

Everyone got all up in arms about the maths equation in my signature last year. Anyone who has any knowledge of applied maths will put anything after a '/' or a divide sign (which you don't use unless you are 10 years old) as being a denominator, yet using technical GCSE bidmas/bodmas bumf you get a different answer. Ultimate maths troll :p
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It's 9.

6/2(1+2) is the same as (6/2)(1+2) and that's the end of it! When given a horribly written question like that, that's open to interpretation, you always use parenthesis.

/Canofworms. :D

And yeah, it's quite shocking how bad the western world is at maths. You try to talk about it anywhere and 99% of people go "EWW MATHS NO" It's a bad attitude.
 
Dan Dan said:
I was listening to radio 4 on the way into work and they were talking about peoples maths skills. They said there was somewhere online where there are 4 questions to see how your numeracy skills are?

Does anybody know where these are?

Thanks
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I can only do 5 of the 4 questions :(
 
Nitefly said:
Everyone got all up in arms about the maths equation in my signature last year. Anyone who has any knowledge of applied maths will put anything after a '/' or a divide sign (which you don't use unless you are 10 years old) as being a denominator, yet using technical GCSE bidmas/bodmas bumf you get a different answer. Ultimate maths troll :p
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I finished secondary school in 2002 — I never learned BODMAS at GCSE Maths. It wasn't until the debate on here about your signature that I even knew it existed...
 
Ok, 49% of adults have math skills of an 11 year old, sure, thats shocking.

But what percentage of careers, for example, actually require math skills beyond those of an 11 year old (ie. basic arithmetic etc) day to day??
 
My arithmetic is poor, I blame electronics and physics, as I go straight to calculator for any question as often they have a lot of squares and divisions. I don't take the time to think for a moment if I can do it in my head. I can in some cases but I am slow. My mental arithmetic is not as good as when I was around 12 where I had to do nearly all questions with no calculator.
 
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