dodgey school maths?
- Thread starter Cyber-Mav
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Man of Honour
However that wasn't the question, it was a question about counting in powers of 10.
If the question was - add 100,000 and then 10,000 we'd all get it.
Like aardvark says above, he's learnt to do something utterly useless that i have never used in the past and will never use in the future.
I was bought up in an Engineering background so completely understand stuff like SOHCAHTOA but counting in powers of 10 has never cropped up.
I was originally thinking along the lines of SlyReaper's answer with log functions UNTIL IT WAS EXPLAINED.
It is what the question was intended to do - take a look at the question it is number 6 from some series of questions, I even posted the relevant bit of the national curriculum. I bet that the rest of the questions were just adding or subtracting different powers of 10 too.
Well it isn't hard to figure out, you know you have to add 10 or 100 or 1000 or 10,000 etc.. (or at least the 9-10 year old kids will) then it is just a case of figuring out what they need to add to fill in the blanks and get the result.
Yes and I'm commenting on what those questions are actually trying to teach and that is simply to get 9 - 10 year olds adding and subtracting those amounts.
FWIW I don't recall adding or subtracting powers of 10 as an exercise in school either... but I know what 10 raised to various integer powers is.
The main issue here was people not paying attention to the question, making some other assumptions/imposing additional requirements that weren't there and/or forgetting that this is something aimed at 9-10 year old primary school kids and it has literally just asked you to add and has given the number you're supposed to end up at.
Soldato
Huey Lewis might disagree.
Hah. I couldn't do that powers of 10 question. Just divided up the total distance covered by the number of months.
Bit of a weird question. As an adult you really don't expect a space shuttle to behave in that manner. +10km, +10km, +10km, +100km doesn't make a whole heap of sense for a space shuttle.
I guess as a kid you don't really care - it's just numbers.
e: I see this has become another thread where @dowie tries to win the internet.
Bit of a weird question. As an adult you really don't expect a space shuttle to behave in that manner. +10km, +10km, +10km, +100km doesn't make a whole heap of sense for a space shuttle.
I guess as a kid you don't really care - it's just numbers.
e: I see this has become another thread where @dowie tries to win the internet.
Not really - it is a question for primary school kids... albeit taken out of the context of whatever other similar questions have been asked and whatever the kid had just been covering in class which has lead to people making up their own rules/overcomplicating it etc...
Caporegime
To be fair, if you were actually in year 5, you'd have had all this explained and done a bunch of other exercises before coming to this one.
Associate
Welcome to life - 99% of content in any learning/certificates is not relevant to life or positon, yet is a requirement
Man of Honour
Exactly
Soldato
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This graph sums it up nicely
Soldato
Speaking in literal english, you can easily add powers of 10 (1, 10, 100, 1000 etc.) to make that question work. But I the way the question is asked is stupid, as it's very plausible to make the assumption that the change of distance must be linear, or follow some mathematically based increase in velocity, rather than being completely random.
I know this is being iamverysmart but this does remind me of being admonished by teachers at school for overthinking things, when to my mind things were mislead/dumbed down.
It's also really stupid just putting months in the column on the left, without a constant time step it makes things even more intangibly and pointless. And in fact you could put any numbers you like in there that aren't negative, because any positive rational number can (I think) be expressed as a power of 10.
I know this is being iamverysmart but this does remind me of being admonished by teachers at school for overthinking things, when to my mind things were mislead/dumbed down.
It's also really stupid just putting months in the column on the left, without a constant time step it makes things even more intangibly and pointless. And in fact you could put any numbers you like in there that aren't negative, because any positive rational number can (I think) be expressed as a power of 10.
Soldato
Of course you've never used it in the past if you've only just learned how to do it....
That doesn't mean that there were never any opportunities to use it.
Soldato
The answer is to add 100,000 once and 10,000 three times. These are the only integer powers of 10 that can be added to get there. But it's misleading from a point of view of reasonable/practical velocities and accelerations, and the question also doesn't say you can't use non-integer powers of 10.
Caporegime
Non-integer powers are not "powers of 10". Just as 11 is not a "multiple of 10".
Soldato
Fair point.
Caporegime
/voiceover guy
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This summer ... in selected theaters ...
DOWIE v CASTIEL: ONE SURVIVOR
(rated R18, contains scenes of boredom, repetition, and endurance typing, adult supervision required)
oh my god I would watch this movie
That isn't very plausible though nor is it particularly smart - it doesn't even work - the shuttle is already >500,000km away yet you think it is constantly accelerating in a straight line whereby it only covers 130,000km over the course of 4 months? How many months did it take to get to the position where the question started? Escape velocity from earth is circa 40,000km per hour btw... not to mention constant acceleration would require a lot of fuel.
Much more plausible that it is drifting along for a bit then whacks on the thrusters for a bit to move position. Even though shuttle missions tend to last days not months...
You can't put any numbers you like in there either, you can only put in powers of 10 as that is what the question asks. Note the question is number 6, probably from a series of questions where the 9-10 year olds have been asked to add/subtract powers of 10 so in context the additional assumptions likely make even less sense, we did see on the snippet posted that it was for "year 5".
The kids just need to notice that the **7,453 doesn't change and so they can see they just need to add 10^4 and/or 10^5.
The posters exclaiming that they never have to add 10,000 or 100,000 in adult life are being a bit silly and everyone else would probably have not been throwing in/made up additional assumptions if they'd seen whatever other questions are contained on the sheet as I'd suspect they're ether adding/subtracting powers of 10 or doing something similar and at around that level.
Forums would die if there weren't posters ready to argue over the most trivial of stuff. Being a pedant/having some attention to detail pays off in the real world though/helps prevent stupid mistakes that cost businesses $$$$.
Caporegime
The point of these exercises are not to get pupils to be able to add powers of ten, it's to get them to understand the decimal number system, and while you may not have to do this kind of adding in "real life" you will certainly have used place values.