Slashdot Mirror
This Chinese Math Problem Has No Answer. Perhaps, It Has a Lot of Them. (washingtonpost.com)
Fifth-graders in China's Shunqing district were recently asked to answer this question: "If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats on board, how old is the ship's captain?" The Washington Post: The apparently unsolvable question sparked a debate over the merits of the Chinese education system and the value it places on the memorization of information over the importance of developing critical thinking skills. "Some surveys show that primary school students in our country lack a sense of critical awareness in regard to mathematics," a statement by the Shunqing Education Department posted Jan. 26 reportedly said. One student offered a pragmatic law-abiding answer: "The captain is at least 18 because he has to be an adult to drive the ship." Meanwhile on Twitter, some have gone with 42, a reference to the science fiction novel "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," by Douglas Adams, in which 42 is the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything." BBC: "If a school had 26 teachers, 10 of which weren't thinking, how old is the principal?" another asked. Some however, defended the school -- which has not been named -- saying the question promoted critical thinking. "The whole point of it is to make the students think. It's done that," one person commented. "This question forces children to explain their thinking and gives them space to be creative. We should have more questions like this," another said.
Asking questions for which there is insufficient data to determine the unique correct answer is confusing and a waste of time, because they will never see such questions in real life. Only teach them things they'll need in real life, I say. Don't fill their heads with nonsense. Every question they will need to answer in real life will have a correct answer, and they need to expect that from others.
If the question has no answer and is supposed to foster critical or creative thinking, how did the teachers grade the answers?
What were the actual answers? As it stands, this is bullshit "news" cause the important part of the whole incident wasn't reported. Why am I not surprised that it's "news" from Jeff Bezos' Blog?
Did the pupils get full credit when they pointed out how the question is unanswerable? Did they get credit for the lower bound of 18? Did they get no credit for things like the 42 answer which is simply a lame old joke?
Fun fact: only some of the students will learn critical thinking skills from this exercise. All of them will completely lose any respect for authority or education though. Some of them will suffer permanent mental scarring because of it.
1. Johnny has an AK-47 with an 80-round clip. If he misses 6 out of 10 shots and shoots 13 times at each drive-by shooting, how many drive-by shootings can he attempt before he has to reload?
2. Jose has 2 ounces of cocaine and he sells an 8-ball to Jackson for $320 and 2 grams to Billy for $85 per gram. What is the street value of the balance of the cocaine if he doesn't cut it?
3. Rufus is pimping for three girls. If the price is $65 for each trick, how many tricks will each girl have to turn so Rufus can pay for his $800-per-day crack habit?
4. Jarone want to cut his 1/2 pound of heroin to make 20% more profit. How many ounces of cut will he need?
5. Willie gets $200 for stealing a BMW, $50 for a Chevy, and $100 for a 4X4. If he has stolen 2 BMWs, 3 4X4s, how many Chevies will he have to steal to make $800?
6. Raoul is in prison for 6 years for murder. He got $10,000 for the hit. If his common law wife is spending $100 per month, how much money will be left when he gets out of prison and how many years will he get for killing the bitch that spent his money?
7. If the average spray can covers 22 square feet and the average letter is 3 square feet, how many letters can a tagger spray with 3 cans of paint?
8. Hector knocked up 6 girls in his gang. There are 27 girls in the gang. What percentage of the girls in the gang has Hector knocked up?
9. Thelma can cook dinner for her 16 children for $7.50 per night. She gets $234 a month welfare for each child. If her $325 per month rent goes up 15%, how many more children should she have to keep up with her expenses?
10. Salvador was arrested for dealing crack and his bail was set at $25,000. If he pays a bail bondsman 12% and returns to Mexico, how much money will he lose by jumping bail?
If 2.4 rounds down to 2 then What's 2.4 + 2.4? Why it's 2.8, which clearly rounds up to 3....
Is this another example of Chinese Math? It's not a demonstration of the misunderstanding/misapplication of significant digits, I know that, although I think that's where you wanted to go.
Wouldn't Chinese math be something like "what is the sum of a character that looks like a garden gate over a triangular squiggle and a character that looks like a horse kind of with two small squares over it"? Does it round up or down?
And 2 + 2 is 5 for large values of 2... Don't believe me?
If 2.4 rounds down to 2 then What's 2.4 + 2.4? Why it's 2.8, which clearly rounds up to 3....
How about that kind of math question?
That's just interval math, and actually the correct answer is between 4 and 6: (2 = a 3) + (2 = b 3) = (4 = x 6)
Methinks you need to check your math, because 2.4 + 2.4 in my math is clearly 22.44.
Oh yay slashdot ate my comparators... that was originally: (2 a < 3) + (2 a < 3) = (4 a < 6)
The Washington Post article links to a BBC article containing the following:
And of course, there's always that one person that has all the answers.
The total weight of 26 sheep and 10 goat is 7,700kg, based on the average weight of each animal," said one Weibo commenter.
In China, if you're driving a ship that has more than 5,000kg of cargo you need to have possessed a boat license for five years. The minimum age for getting a boat's license is 23, so he's at least 28.
Not enough information.
Y = 26S + 10G, solve for X.
Any other response would require a lengthy list of assumptions, the omission of which would make the answer automatically wrong. The captain needs to be at least 18 to operate a ship? That assumes that the captain is operating the ship legally, is operating the ship in an area where being an adult is required, is operating a type of ship that requires legally recognized captains, is a human ship operator and not a human, animal, or inanimate object bestowed with the title of captain in an honorary capacity, exists, etc. Even with all necessary assumptions, any single answer would be incomplete at best. Maybe a correct answer can be given by mapping out all of the possibilities and all of the assumptions associated with each, but the only certainly correct answer is that the problem cannot be solved with the information provided.
Oh yay slashdot ate my fucking html entities... are you kidding. (2 LESS-THAN-OR-EQUAL-TO a LESS-THAN 3) + (2 LESS-THAN-OR-EQUAL-TO a LESS-THAN 3) = (4 LESS-THAN-OR-EQUAL-TO a LESS-THAN 6)
Math is fucking hard on slashdot... they should make kids do it... ya know, in case of a post apocalypse where only ASCII chars are allowed.
Purple, because aliens don't wear hats.
Johnny observes three stars through his telescope. The stars' temperatures are X, Y, and Z kelvin. What is the total temperature observed?
when he was asked to evaluate science textbooks for the school board in Pasadena.
... and is known as the 'age of the captain' problem, introduced by Gustave Flaubert, a french writer.
It's been used to study how children in elementary school react to word problems. It has notthing to do with maths.
See e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3...
Shouldn't that be "20 sick sheep"?
If my post were a car, this sig would be its bumper-sticker.
This reminds me of the married couple handshake problem-
"My wife and I recently attended a party at which there were four other married couples. Various handshakes took place. No one shook hands with oneself, nor with one's spouse, and no one shook hands with the same person more than once. After all the handshakes were over, I asked each person, including my wife, how many hands he (or she) had shaken. To my surprise each gave a different answer. How many hands did my wife shake?"
There is a nice elegant solution to this one but it SEEMS like it shouldn't be possible to answer./P
Teacher: I... I dont knoAAARRRRRGGH
The answer to life, the universe and everything is the ascii value of the asterisk.
And Douglas Adams knew that.
The ASCII code for * is 42. Everything is the answer to Everything.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
what is the sum of a character that looks like a garden gate over a triangular squiggle and a character that looks like a horse kind of with two small squares over it?
Pah! easy: Steeplechase
Does it round up or down?
Depends on the bookie
The question sounds like the quality of requirements documents I've been handed. Life is full of self-important people telling you to do the impossible with inadequate information, tools, time, and money. Sounds like the kids got an early insight into the "Joy of work."
"If a school had 26 teachers, 10 of which weren't thinking, how old is the principal?"
I think his or her age will be around 50. A young principal would have got rid of the non-thinkers, but this one has been around enough years that there is some kind of loyalty/blackmail thing going on with those 10 teachers. If he were closer to retirement, he would not be as worried about blackmail; he could push back for a short while until he got his retirement locked in.
So he or she has been there a long time, but still not too close to retirement, so I'll guess 50.
A dingo ate my sig...
Whoooooosh
Heh. Yes, I was reminded of an old joke that starts, "You are the bus driver." It then continues through a series of people getting on and off the bus at each stop, to get the listener adding and subtracting. And then at the end, "How old is the bus driver?"
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Take a three-storied house, with eight windows on each floor. On the roof there are two dormer windows and two chimneys. On every floor there are two tenants. And now, tell me, gentlemen, in what year the valet's grandmother died.
Every end has half a stick.
In a cemetery?
L.
If you have 1 bucket with 2 gallons and 1 bucket with 4 gallons, how many buckets you got?
rigged call in quiz show bus question
https://mikebattista.com/2009/...
The Cats on a Bus puzzle has the hallmarks of a Moon Logic Puzzle: "4 girls are travelling on a bus. Each of them have 3 baskets, in each basket there are 4 cats. Each cat has 3 little kittens. How many legs are in the bus?" note "222": The kittens were not on the bus, and the count included the driver's legs, and the legs of the seats as well
Here's another one: "4 girls are travelling on a bus. In each hand they hold 4 baskets, in each basket there are 4 cats. Each cat has 3 little kittens. One cat gets away. How many legs are on the bus?" note "1359": you begin to wonder what type of fuzzy math led to that
"THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." - The Last Question
And adding unrelated lower case letters because the filter is wrong. The capitals are correct in the quotation.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Asking questions for which there is insufficient data to determine the unique correct answer is confusing and a waste of time, because they will never see such questions in real life.
The difference is that in real life you usually have some data relevant to answering the question. If you don't then you go out and get something and infer the age of the captain from that. If you want to test critical thinking a better question would have included some details related to the age of the captain e.g. was s/he married, did s/he have kids and if so what were their ages, how big was the ship?, how many years had they been a captain etc. However then you would have need to provide data on the average age of ship captains, the average number of years captains have served, the average age people have children at etc.
That's how real life works. If you don't have any data relevant to answering the question then you either work on getting some related data or you put the question aside until some relevant data is available.
Easier to write 2 .LE. a .LT. 3. Fortunately, everyone understands FORTRAN.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There is not enough information to resolve the question --- if you found something you say is an answer, then it was a mere guess or it wasn't through reasoning. This does not encourage Critical thinking; it encourages guesstaking and making unverifiable questionable assumptions and coming up with creative answers.
"The captain is at least 18 because he has to be an adult to drive the ship."
See, the question didn't provide any context to make that a reasonable proposition.
Who says the laws are being observed? Perhaps the captain is operating in a country where 15 year olds can drive ships.
What kind of ship is it --- maybe this is a toy boat with toy goats and toy sheep in a bathtub? Who says the captain is driving this ship, anyways?
Critical thinking would be present an argument, or present a proposition question or claim or paper with information that contains flawwed reasoning and ask the students to analyze the paragraph and say whether they agree or not, and if there are any problems in what was written.
I'm pretty sure I've experienced something like this with Python's default rounding mechanisms, before I learned to explicitly require a specific type of variable.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I would assume that this to be the case... Sheeps and goats.. Mothers and children maybe. Thats what they mean by critical thinking... outside the box
[($)]
For some reason memories of Fortran programming projects from college just came flooding back to me. Be thankful you at least have upper and lower case characters to choose from.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
You aren't by chance an assembly line quality control 'specialist'?
The question does not specify a precision or tolerance, anything else is fudging the numbers - the argument is poor.
In one of Richard Feynman's books, he told about his experiences at a university in Brazil. He was horrified to realize that the students were ritually memorizing the course material with very little actual understanding.
When he asked questions in a way that echoed the textbook, students were able to recite an answer straight out of the book. But when he made up a "word problem" they were totally unable to answer.
A student was quizzed on physics, asked to compute what happens when light passes through a diamagnetic substance, and he recited the answer correctly and then calculated the correct result given the index and thickness of the substance. Immediately afterward, Feynman talked to that same student; Feynman held up a book and asked what would happen if the book was made of glass and he looked at something through the book. The student didn't realize that glass is a diamagnetic substance, and gave a very incorrect answer.
Richard Feynman on education in Brazil
In the domain of math questions, I saw an example: if a person has 4 boards of length 2.5 metres each, and cuts them with a saw, how many 1-metre boards can that person make? Obviously the correct answer is 8 (two per board, with 4 left-over pieces of length 0.5 metres minus the width of two saw cuts). If you were just playing with the numbers abstractly you might think that since 4 * 2.5 == 10 that you could produce ten 1-metre board segments. You can't actually glue together 4 boards to make a single board, and you can't actually make zero-width cuts.
I can't speak for others, but I enjoy word problems more than abstract problems. (Good ones, anyway... you can take a simple problem and write an annoying and confusing word problem, and nobody likes those.)
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Not enough information. How fast was the plane going? At what angle to the border did it crash? Into what kind of terrain did it crash? It's possible that the crash did not cause the plane to get lodged underground, meaning the survivors aren't buried at all. ;)
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
C'mon. If the impact was hard enough, not all of them are going to be moving too fast to be buried.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
...steadily rising for the past decade then how much does Donald Trump actually weight? Extra credit - given the average salinity of ocean water, will The Donald float? *duck and cover*
Pretty sure you worded the question wrong. Looking at your min-max answer, did mean to say 60 legs?
This problem is not sufficiently bounded to solve from a mathematical perspective.
(That's the actual answer... You don't need to be over 18 if you are piloting the boat illegally and there may not even be a captain.)
Because this cargo is typical for the early 19th century, but not the 20th.
Following a robotics competition. They were interested in the differences between the approaches, every Chinese robot team had the same bot, and basically competed with tweaking the code optimizing speed. Efficient but not innovative. Our kids had bots that were not fast, but were playing out a half dozen HW/SW combinations, original construction, etc. Innovative but not efficient. They were intrigued. They attended our whole-school meeting, then on to the first session with a mixed grades 1-2 class. First up, show and tell. Student holding forth at one end of the room with his curated stuff, kids on carpet squares, teacher sitting on the table behind the kids. The visitors had a dozen questions about this. They would not have been more intrigued had the whole thing taken place on the ceiling. Later touring, they were interested in our 3D printers. They did not have these in their classrooms. I pointed out the irony that nearly every piece of these printers was made in China. They do have 3D printers now, IIRC they spec'd the same one for every school. We are now halfway through an exchange program, their kids came to learn with us this year, we'll go there next year. Sharing is good. Learning is good. The specific means should always be evolving.
From the country that brought you "The sound of one hand clapping" comes a twist on the "there is no spoon" meme.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Having no correct answer also implies there is no wrong answer, so everyone who answers the question gets it right.
The answer is your age, with an explanation of "I am the captain now.".
On how much the essay aligns with the teacher's views.
I dislike teachers like you. Why? I show my work. You can see the lines on my face, the callouses on my hands, and the holes in my boots. But when I gave the landlord 9/10 of the rent, he still threw me out.
bad copy&paste and no QC
Hillary has lived in NY State for some 18 years now, which is longer than I've had this account.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
If a plane crashes on the border of two countries, where are the survivors buried?
The typical "you don't bury survivors" answer is technically incorrect: everybody eventually dies. The correct answer is "the same places they were going to be buried, upon their respective deaths."
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
n/t
... Jimmy Saville groupie - OAP
Will someone please do the needful for the captain so he can leave with his sheep and goats?
They missed the point of a very old joke question that starts with "Imagine you being the captain of a boat..."
If a plane crashes on the border of two countries, where are the survivors buried?
It depends on how racist the first responder is.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
the age of the captain problem has some modifications and variations which actually can be answered and also tests word problem understanding: one is: you are the captain of a boat in which 25 sheep and 10 goats are. How old is the captain? the captain problem is great the first time you see it. But again, once you have seen it, then it is still a template (and it is a 150n year old template). Solving it does not require any creativity any more. So, the pedagogical benefits are minimal. Except of course that if such a problem appears in an exam, it pisses off the majority of students.
If you don't give me enough data, I make my own shit up. Passive aggressive maths!
Task Mangler
The article does not mention how the question was posted: in a written test, oral examination or debate.
If the student cannot get information from the questioner (written and oral exam), then the question is absurd, especially since it will be scored however subjectively. Also, 5th graders should not be concerned with valid ages for commanding ships. Here I can support the fight agains memorization (I always struggle with remembering unrelated/non-interesting things).
If it was in a debate, then I can accept it as a way to force the child to ask questions (you know, like IRL). This kind of curiosity can help memorize things (although with this question in particular I argue it's usefullness like in the point before).
Either way, scoring this question seems to be extremely subjective (a good student fails and a lucky one passes, or the teacher gives move information to some students than others).
If a school prioritizes teaching than scoring, then questions like these make sense (again, in a debate environment). However, the standardized teaching, which I assume occurs in most countries, needs a quantization of quality, thus it's results are based on scoring. A good example for this is all the IQ tests that ask me (from EU) US geographical or political questions. Intelligence is not memorization. Sure, more information may help intelligence, but more time should be spent processing than memorizing.
Actually I am from India and some time this type of lame, same or good question were asked by seniors, elders or teachers. The question start like this "Suppose you are the principal of the school and If a school had 26 teachers, 10 of which weren't thinking, how old is the principal?" This may be further added by other garbage information so that the child in question forgets that initially supposed to be the principal. So the answer is the "age of the person to whom we are asking the question." The purpose of such questions are how carefully you are listening and deducing the information further. This need not to be headline.
2 is anything greater than or equal to 1.5 or less than 2.5. 2.5 rounds to 3 (in classical mathematics. IEEE floating-point rounding modes are an entirely different category of crazy). So the limit of 2x2 is greater than or equal to 3, less than 5.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Old enough to get a commercial ship's master's license
Open-ended questions are great, but in order to answer you should have some idea of the domain of the desired answer. Am I meant to give the purely mathematical response, "There is not enough information"? Or to say "a non-negative number" because we know a living person's age must be a positive value? Should I specify more closely as "a non-negative real number" because I know an age can have fractional units and has no imaginary component? Am I meant to use my knowledge of the world to give a possible range -- "I know that you need to be 18 to be licensed as a ship's captain and the mandatory retirement age is 65, so the answer is bounded by those two values"? Is a probability wanted -- "Assuming a gaussian distribution of ages between 18 and 65..."? Or if it's a creativity exercise should we go a different direction and write a backstory for the captain, giving his age and motivations for captaining a ship full of livestock?
Hopefully the students had some guidelines regarding the sort of answer the exam was looking for.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
In a cemetery where they died after they lived their life.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Yes, you can burn them and spread ashes into ocean. I take this as an axiom which I don't need to prove: everybody dies eventually, even those that survived a plane crash.
L.
What I like best is when Venus is perfectly aligned with a crescent moon and you see it nestling between the horns.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
This isn't like that because there is no relevant data. If it was "how many footballs can you fit in a swimming pool" there is relevant data, even if you don't have it to hand. You could even state it as something like ( L x W x H ) / D^3, and go on from there to discuss different forms of packing, whether you actually are packing them like atoms in a crystal or just chucking them in randomly, whether they're actual round footballs that you use with your feet, whether the water's been emptied out etc etc.
This is more like "What's the difference between a duck". Fucking rubbish.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's interesting in the sense that it's a question that is more likely to trip you up the more you know. If you don't really think about it and just add the numbers together you'll get it correct. But if you know something about astronomy adding the temperatures makes no sense as that's a meaningless number so there's no reason to ever do that. Which will lead you down the path of "maybe they actually mean something else" which would be not be the answer they are looking for.