As I recall, the French tried that after the Revolution, and it didn’t work out well for them. As in, almost no one in France could get their heads around the new system and no one in other countries adopted it, making the exchange of information between countries a trifle dicey. They eventually gave up the idea as unworkable, but it took a while.
ETA: Damnit, ninja’d, and with better information, to boot.
No, having to use a calculator to figure 6 x 1, or 6 x 0, is something to be ashamed of.
It’s not. I haven’t worked a cash register since 1985 and here are the two issues I remember most. Both are related to a mistake being made when the amount tendered was entered. Let’s ay the order total was $5.82 and the person paid with a $10 bill, resulting in change due of $4.18. The cashier incorrectly entered $100.00 as the amount tendered, so the register showed $94.18 due. The people with some sense of math either counted up to give change or dropped $90 from what the register showed. There were other people who called the manager to cancel the order. One group did so because they could not be persuaded that as long as they gave the correct change ,the total in the cash register would be correct. The other group understood the total would be correct, but thought the distribution of bills would be off - the register would think they had more $100 bills and fewer $10 bills than they really had. Still not sure which group I think was dumber.
I honestly find that shocking. Not unbelievable, but something went wrong there in that school system.
Frankly, my kids – 7 and 5 – are being taught better math than I was at that age. One goes to public school; the other to private (Catholic school). Their numeracy is far beyond what mine was at that age.
Very common these days is the teller who believes that once the amount tendered has been entered, the transaction can’t be changed in any way: Say the amount is 18.25, you hand over $20, and the cash register displays change owed = $1.75 . If you then find a quarter and offer it, great confusion ensues.
IME this is much more likely to be a problem with a young employee. For these, I’ve made a rule: “Coins first, small bills next, large ones last”.
Troo storee from a Health Ed class I took at a community college. The instructor was basically a P.E. major but with a concentration in the more scientific aspects, like physiology and anatomy and … and Health Education.
So we were talking about Blood Alcohol Content and the effects of various levels of BAC – Slurred speech, unsteady walk, falling, passing out, dying. The BACs under discussion were in the range of 0.01 to 0.20 or so.
So there was this question on the exam:
When we discussed the answers in class, one student (who was probably paying more attention than most) asked: “Wait, doesn’t a BAC of 0.50 mean that your blood is half alcohol? How could BAC ever be anywhere near that amount?”
Okay, I’ll give that student a half-pass. She misunderstood 0.50% to mean 50%. Given that, she correctly recognized that blood being half alcohol was totally implausible. Good for her.
What blew my mind was the instructor: He confessed that math wasn’t his strong subject, and he couldn’t explain the student’s error.
I wonder if the confusion between time and decimal numbers is due to the introduction of digital clocks and watches?
Years ago I tried to write a spreadsheet to calculate time worked multiplied by hourly rate. Simple stuff until I included a night shift. I think I discovered that Exell calculates time, based on the number of seconds since 1/1/1900 or something similar. I gave up in the end.
Except as written, the student was correct. Where is the percent sign?
Thank you- I thought I was somehow reading something wrong.
That’s
(e) Flammable.
Well, this is from social media, but it’s not hilarious (I mean, hilarious is a high bar), but any time a Twitter thread starts on the topic of how little money artists make on streams (which is true), someone will inevitably say something like “at $0.003 per stream, a billion streams would only earn $30,000, ripoff!”
There seems to be some instinct to take a number clearly denominated in $, and, upon seeing all those zeroes after the decimal, turn it into cents. Just keep the units, folks.
Or the other way around, when they say things like “Bezos could give everyone in the US a million dollars, and still have billions of dollars left over.”
Kids are going to have a better handle on certain math/arithmetic trivia and tricks, because they’ve just learned it. Order of Operations is, to be frank, a load of BS. It’s a supposedly ‘standard’ way of handling equations that are deliberately vague. In the real world, there would be context to the 10x0 , and it should be obvious that it doesn’t add to the total.
I’m helping my son with his 8th grade Algebra and run into this. I know algebra, I have a physics degree and was pretty good at the math, even if I haven’t used it much in 30 years. But, I’m not going to remember that you can calculate the x-intercept from a Standard Form linear equation by dividing C by A. I’ll get to C/A, but I need to do the steps.
I think BAC is typically written as a number without a percent sign.
It’s actually not a percent either. It’s grams per 100mL of blood.
Which can be worked out to a percent if you want to, but that’s not how it is meant to be displayed.
The thing is, when you’re a cashier, you’re on auto-pilot. I worked at a grocery store as a teen. I was also top of my honors calculus class at the time. But if you gave me extra change after I put it in my brain would basically do the Mac spinning wheel.
I recently encountered a very basic error in conceptual math/logic (vs the arithmetic type being discussed here).
Some “relationship advice” person wrote that women are more likely to break off relationships than men, and then said that that’s why there are more single women than single men.
Hard to imagine what she might have been thinking. (I’m guessing she just wasn’t.)
When I worked Reg-op in the drivethru, pre-credit cards, I would always have change made to the next dollar already prepared. That way, they’d hand me bills, and I would hand them their change in the same motion. It sped things up considerably.
If someone gave me extra change, it didn’t take that long to figure it out, but it did interrupt my rhythm and train of thought. Not to mention that about half the time, the extra change that they gave me didn’t add up to a whole dollar amount, as they did their math wrong.
When I was growing up, our state sales tax was a simple 5%, with no additional county/municipal/other taxes. At a restaurant, my Dad would look at the check, and multiply the sales tax amount by 3 to figure the 15% tip, rounding up to an even amount.
What’s vague about it?