I thought this was going to be about correlation between low intelligence and having a shag carpet, which makes a lot of sense but might require a meta-analysis to be sure.
Which would include when you bought it. If you bought in 1970, and it was either avocado or rust, you may have been cutting edge modern. If you still have it though…
@Jackmannii. That is exactly what I expected.
As to the folks fussing about “literacy” versus “numeracy”, I suspect we’re missing the larger context that this problem & results was taken from the chapter on numeracy in his larger book on all sorts of “…acies” associated with a quality education.
Moreover, it’s easy for perfectly intelligent people to gloss over that the price given in the add is price per square yard, not price per square foot.
My first, second, and third instinct with this problem was to convert 12" x 9" into 108 square feet and multiply 108 x $9.49. But that’s wrong – you have to pick up that it’s $9.49 per square yard.
Or, assuming the question as shown by @Palooka is the actual example, we just don’t think much of this test. It demonstrates a lack of understanding of context and detail that would apply to the question. Exactly what I would expect from a neuroscientist attempting to deal with the real world.
Knowing from general knowledge that carpet in the USA is always priced by the square yard, I immediately noticed the room was very conveniently 3x4 yards = 12 square yards. Which would be 12sy x $10 = $120 less roughly 12 x 50 cents = $6 so ~$114 overall.
If the answers were multiple choice that’d have taken about 7 seconds total.
But I spent the last 35 years doing simple arithmetic like that every few minutes for work.
The carpet example doesn’t surprise me in the least. Lots of people just don’t like math, they say to themselves that they can’t do math, they don’t remember how to do square areas…
This tells me pretty much what I need to know about the Great Courses as well.
I’ve mentioned this before. My gf was shopping for carpet and asked me to measure our living area, which I did, and gave her the results in square feet. She was looking at ads that gave price for square yards, so the price she calculated using square feet was excessive.
She asked me to measure again. I did and got the same results. Then she gave me the blueprints and asked me to calculate the area. It came out the same.
Finally I asked why she did not believe my measurements and she told me she was shopping for carpet. I asked if the prices were per square yard or foot and she said ohhhhh.
This. I thought it would involve a complicated tradeoff between the two credit cards and what they did or did not cover in the way of carpet purchases. The problem as stated is simple once you get past the unit conversion. They didn’t even make the room a non-integral number of yards which would have required you to determine how much overhead you’d have to buy.
If the test subjects were anything like me, they probably looked at it and groaned, “Not a word problem!” and just gave up on the spot. I’ve gotten better with the years (as my kids’ first algebra teacher used to say, life is a word problem), but I have terrible and humiliating memories of trying to calculate the square footage of a roof without actually going up there. To be fair, that problem also required a bit of geometry.
My mom’s house had green avocado shag carpet in 1970, when we moved in. She finally replaced it in 1981…with a shorter, rust-colored shag.
This is true, but the author implied it was the carpet part people found difficult, pointing out the multiple but basic steps of calculating the square whatever of the room and multiplying this by the cost of carpet per square whatever was difficult. The author did not similarly elaborate on the first component.
I didn’t see the vaguely designed questions but do not think they were meant to be tricky or take professional minutiae into account. This is an elementary level math problem, but certainly many people are not comfortable with math. But I am always surprised at people who can’t, say, find prominent countries on a map when maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
Something I read a long time ago in a book about human nature. I can’t independently vouch for it, but I’ll share it FWIW:
They said broadly speaking there are two kinds of thinkers.
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Those who look at a problem and think “Do I know the answer or do I not know the answer?” If the former they spit it out. If the latter, they’re done.
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Those who look at a problem and if they don’t already know the answer, they think “How do I figure this out?” Then tackle that process leading perhaps to an answer and perhaps not.
The former group approached school as rote memorization, didn’t get very far, and have a mind that can best be described as incurious and almost incapable of problem solving. They can look the answer up in their head and that’s it. No answer there means the question is simply unanswerable. They’re utterly stymied.
This method of thinking applies to far more than just math.
The unexpected unit conversion (ft2 to yd2) is probably what catches the unobservant and those who believe that word problems are hard. TBH, most primary school story problem exercises don’t incorporate a unit change unless recognizing and adjusting to unit changes is an explicit part of that section’s curriculum.
Yeah–this seems like a really unscientific test of literacy, and a slightly better test of people’s ability to catch asshole tricks in word problems. I bet the people that got this problem right are also good at figuring out how magic tricks work; but that’s a very specific kind of intelligence. Absent clear evidence that this little problem correlates with other, more established measures of literacy, I’m unlikely to give it more than an eye-roll.
Real life is full of asshole tricks in word problems, more complex than this trivial example.
Problem-solving is a useful real-life skill. It’s unfortunate that some people have convinced themselves they’ll never get good at it.
Of course. But “word problem” is a specific genre of writing, and most word problems don’t engage in this sort of trick. A person who reads the problem and misses this trick isn’t necessarily illiterate.
I wonder how you guys would get on over here. You measure the room in feet because that’s what you are used to, but carpet is priced per square metre.
And then they want paid in pounds! I thought y’all used kilograms!