I had a friend ask me what 1% of $120 is. Based on my experience, I suspect more than half the population can’t answer this question, including a lot of people with college degrees. I know a lot of bills that have passed Congress that wouldn’t survive 5 minutes of analysis with a spreadsheet.
Are we sharing our brain-dead math stories now? As I mentioned above, I was a math tutor. I did statistics. In theory, you had to know bare-bones algebra to get into that class. I had one student, who I helped with some problem, and the final probability came out to be .1/.2 (yes, that’s point one over point two). I asked him to simplify that, and he reached for his calculator. I said, in all capital letters, “YOU DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ CALCULATOR TO SIMPLIFY THAT!” Whereupon, he panicked. So he got to use his stinkin’ calculator.
I took the mandatory junior-college-level health education class. The teacher was a “Physical Education Science” major, meaning he had some kind of actual science (physiology, whatever) with his P.E. degree. We had a test with a multiple choice question, “A man with a BAC (blood alcohol content) of 0.5% would most likely be . . .” (The correct answer was D. Dead)
One math-dead student was at least wise enough to raise her hand ask what she didn’t understand: That means your blood is HALF ALCOHOL? How could you stay alive even close to long enough to even get anywhere near that?
The teacher confessed that math wasn’t his strong suit, and he didn’t know how to resolve that question!
ETA: I made the above two stories the core of an English Composition 1-A essay I wrote. Even the English teacher was shocked at those stories.
And snark is found in 60 to 138 percent of all responders on message boards, depending on the definition of “responder” and “message board” and “snark.”
Ask a question in GQ, get a GQ-worthy answer.
Percentages have a habit of throwing people off, but the question in the OP, as presented was simply 1000000/365/21. Or, after some adjustments 1000000 divided by the number of days it was driven. This is a 5th grade word problem. The funny thing is, people will ask me this type of question as well. “Hey Joey, this item was $275.99, it was marked down by 30%, and then they’re taking another $20% off at the register plus I have a coupon for 15% off…how much is it going to be” and they look at me goofy when I grab my phone (for the calculator) and say “Aren’t you a math major”..“Ummm, yeah, but that doesn’t mean I spent 4 years doing arithmetic..you’re an English major and I bet you didn’t spend 4 years memorizing the dictionary.”
That’s true after a while, but Hondas are very well known for holding up for a long time. IIRC Honda’s are designed to go something like 350K before they start having any kind of big problems. And as someone else said, pride is a big part of it I’m sure. If you’re putting a new engine in a 20 year old car or welding the floor back together so you don’t put your foot through it, it’s probably time, from a monetary stand point, to get a new one.
And I’ll bet you that a lot of people who ask questions like this, when they were in school, objected to all the “stupid word problems”.
Back in the late 80s, I purchased a new Volvo. My dealer gave me a short subscription to their magazine. In one of the issues, they had an article about a guy (who lived on Long Island, IIRC) who’d put one million miles on a Volvo (don’t remember the model) in 20 years. In those days, odometers rolled over at 100,000 miles, so he must have had maintainance records to convince the Volvo people that it was actually that many miles. At any rate, they gave him a new, top-of-the-line Volvo because of it.
I was amazed that anyone could put 50,000 miles per year on a car for that many years, especially one from about 1967 or so. It did say he had to rebuild the engine once or twice, but still…
I was hoping no one would notice that little plot hole when I wrote it.
I was one of those people that always liked the word problems, they broke the monotony…then I grew up to be a math major.
255 or 256 work year is pretty standard. A little less for state/federal employees. I figure about 93 miles one way. I use to drive close to that at my last job. 10 miles of those each way was pure torture.
You’re apparently not an American. Six weeks not working per year sounds like a crazy dream to us.
Here there are typically 2 weeks of vacation, but only after a couple years working at a job. There are a grand total of 7 otherwise-work-days which are nationally recognized holidays. Which most people have as off days unless they work in retail. Then those are extra-busy sales days & every store employee must work. Some states have 1 or 2 more; most have zero extras.
Most people don’t have paid sick days. They can in many cases consume vacation days when too ill to work. For the rest of the populace or those with chronic conditions it’s work ill or don’t get paid.
Basically we’re just one big sweatshop. Sometimes the wage rates are pretty nice. But the work / home life balance is mostly a disaster whether you’re at minimum wage or making 6 figures.
Or more simply, the average full time person in the US works 2000 hours per year.
Something my dad taught me years ago was when you’re looking at jobs, take the amount they offer you per hour and multiply it by two to figure out the annual pay. So if a job said it would pay $12.00/hour, you know you’ll make about $24,000 per year. Conversely, the entry level job that says it pays $50,000 probably isn’t going to start you at $25.00 per hour so you have to wonder how many hours they’re going to work you (50+ a week? Weekends? Overtime? Holidays?). It’s just one of those nice little tricks to be able to do quickly and easily in your head. No, it’s not exact, but it can quickly get you a rough number when you’re talking to someone. (This is based on two weeks off w/o pay, and not counting benefits into the number…like I said it’s a rough number. My dad is big into rounding numbers to make them easier to work with in his head)
his name is Irv Gordon he is still driving his 1964 Volvo 1800. The odo on old Volvos turn over at 999,999 so documenting 1,000,000 miles isn’t tough.
Irv has somewhere around 3 million miles on his 1800 now http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/07/irv-gordon-2-8-million-mile-volvo/
I’ve met him, hell of a nice guy that really likes to drive his car.
Understatement of the year. 
“I’ve had this car since 1990. It’s had eight new engines and three new bodies…” 
Irv lives near NYC but has been known to drive to Canada for lunch.
Bravo for your dad, with + points for teaching you. Working with approximate numbers is a highly valuable skill, not much emphasized any more. I have an old (i.e., older than I am) college algebra textbook published in 1942 (or maybe 1492?) that was around the house since before I can remember, that I still keep to this day. It had a whole chapter on working with approximate numbers, with a level of detail and techniques that just isn’t taught any more.
At the junior college I mentioned a few posts above, I took the basic-college-level chemistry class. The prof knew his chemistry inside-out and outside-in, except for the math, which he was lousy at. And you really need to know approximate numbers for physical sciences! He had one exam question that would get you different answers, depending on whether you did the math the over-simplified way he taught, or if you did really correct work with the rounded numbers. (My take: Teaching simplified math may be okay, but you should never have put a question like that on the test.) I did the math the truly right way (using upper- and lower-boundaries for all the round numbers), and thus got the “wrong” answer, which was just totally above the prof’s head.