Apologies for not being able to let this one go, resurrecting a dead thread and such. Hasta have something to do w/ watching a quiz show pitting an IT person against Grade 5 kids last night.Meister said:
The arithmetic question originally posed actually does reflect real-world situations. Sort of: Imagine the Principal asking, "What's the proportion of old wooden desks to new steel ones in each department, and if it's not the same across the board, how big is the disparity between departments? Wooden-deskwise, that is." Hardly apples and oranges, no matter how foggy the assignment.
Subtracting one percentage from another does give an number that does reflect the disparity, even if it winds up being a percentage of … What? As alienencounter says,"…it's a useless number". Hardly a way to encourage kids to think and apply math skills to the real world.
A better comparison would relate each department's numbers to the total in the school, so that the departmental percentage shares of desks could be compared. And a better question might have been: How many desks would have to be swapped to make the percentages equal in both?
With homework questions as inept as this, be thankful the 'answers' are in the back of the book, so you can reverse-engineer them. And that's a useful lesson for kids to learn.
