I work in a school and we have an intersting conundrum. There is problem, involving algorithims, in one of out 7th grade textbooks, which NONE of our teachers are able to solve. Even the answer book doesn’t give the explaination.
Can anyone help?
Here’s the problem:
Complete the table
A 2.3 1.6 3.5 4.1 5 7.05 B 1.6 * .95 * 1.8 1.2 4.9 1.5
the numbers in italics are the answers from the teachers handbook - but the handbook doesn’t tell us the method for determining them.
I presume that the original problem gives two rows with two blanks in the bottom row, which are supposed to be filled in with the numbers you gave in italics.
Usually the homework problems bear some relationship to the material that immediately precedes them. What is that chapter about? What are the problems like that are immediately before and immediately after this one?
Well, I might, or more correctly the Grade 7 teacher who plonked the book down on my desk might! I would have preferred to use “magic formula” because that’s what maths is to me
The italics were hard to see so made them Bold instead. Placed in spread sheet and nothing tried so far works. Were there no other clues, examples, text, etc?
There should have been something.
I’m suspicious of the whole thing, partly becuase the “table” has only 2 rows, but also because the numbers don’t all have the same number of significant digits. Are we to assume that 5 =5.00 and 1.6 = 1.60, for example? Something’s screwy. If you were taking logarithms, there would be a lot of rounding involved, so I’d expect all the numbers to have the same number of significant digits.
Well, it’s not a linear relationship, and I can’t see any other simple functional relationship possible. With just 4 given data points, and no obvious sequential relationship among the A values, I don’t think one answer is going to be less arbitrary than any other.
(If those were the results of an experiment, with blank values unknown results, there is no way you could predict the unknown results.)
There’s gotta be more to it than what you’ve given us.
Either you left out part of the problem or its instructions (possibly because you didn’t realize it was part of the problem), or the book itself left out part of the problem, possibly through some printing error, in which case you could scratch your head all day and not figure it out.
