There is an enormous amount of complaining about notation here...funny. Get out of your engineering/prorgramming mindsets, it makes you look just as bad as the kid who does not know what '=' means in a mathematical statement.
Look, we have the statement 4+3+2 = ( ) + 2. First of all, focus in on the fact that the person reading this statement is not someone who knows things such as programming, or would even try to analyze the idea of 'nothing in the parenthesis - must be a zero'. We are looking at kid, who has numerous times already seen the problems of the form 5 + 6 = ( ). The language is not new to a 1st graded, 2nd grader, 3rd grader...and you know what, it is not new to any of you either, you are just hung up on the way you learned mathematics later in high school and then in college. You are even hung up on the symbol 'x' which carries alot more extra meaning than the empty space. (Think about the problem: fill in the blank, "I _______(eat) too many cookies for breakfast and now my stomach hurts" - I am sure most of you have no issues realizing that the problem is asking you to write down 'ate', not 'blame my sister for having eaten').
Return to the original issue at hand. The schools in United States are focused on having kids learn to solve specific format of the problem. Mathematics are not taught as a set of rules that can be applied universally. Rather - for every problem there is a specific order of steps you follow. Change the problem slightly, and everything goes downhill, students try to do stupid things. Heck, in high school I had a teacher who would give word problems with more information given then necessary to answer the question. We had a straight-A student stumped over it because he couldn't figure out what equations he had to invoke to use all the data! Education here does not push understanding the problem - it pushes memorizing solutions. So the kid in the OP's example sees '4 + 3 + 2 = ( )...', and ignores the rest of the statement. It's more of 'I know what to do with this set of symbols!', not 'what does this line say?' Someone here calls it a poorly debugged complier - but a compiler is worthless as a human being. Educating to understand the meaning of each individual symbol should produce students that have no issues understanding such new statements 99% of the time.
What I am trying to say: we should be trying to teach a language. There is no difference between "4 + 3 + 2 = ( ) + 2" and "sum of four, three, and two is equal to sum of something and two", and the remainder of the question is just "fill in the blank", which someone taking a test is keenly aware of. Understand the meaning of symbols - parsing is trivial for the human brain. Don't understand the meaning of symbols - and you are an outdated compiler.
On top of this: you folks are so obsessed with the variable... many times to date when teaching kids I found that having an empty space for a number is much easier than an x. Kid with no prior education in equations will attempt and likely succeed to solve an equation with variable listed as an empty box (mind you, I focus on teaching my students to understand individual symbols as words in a sentence). Put in an x without prior explanation - things go downhill fast. The variable itself is an abstraction that takes quite a bit of effort to understand, and many many people never understand at all (going through years of even college level education after).
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Sony Vaio W does, if you want one in 10" category. Quite a few 11" netbooks do also.
There is an enormous amount of complaining about notation here...funny. Get out of your engineering/prorgramming mindsets, it makes you look just as bad as the kid who does not know what '=' means in a mathematical statement. Look, we have the statement 4+3+2 = ( ) + 2. First of all, focus in on the fact that the person reading this statement is not someone who knows things such as programming, or would even try to analyze the idea of 'nothing in the parenthesis - must be a zero'. We are looking at kid, who has numerous times already seen the problems of the form 5 + 6 = ( ). The language is not new to a 1st graded, 2nd grader, 3rd grader...and you know what, it is not new to any of you either, you are just hung up on the way you learned mathematics later in high school and then in college. You are even hung up on the symbol 'x' which carries alot more extra meaning than the empty space. (Think about the problem: fill in the blank, "I _______(eat) too many cookies for breakfast and now my stomach hurts" - I am sure most of you have no issues realizing that the problem is asking you to write down 'ate', not 'blame my sister for having eaten'). Return to the original issue at hand. The schools in United States are focused on having kids learn to solve specific format of the problem. Mathematics are not taught as a set of rules that can be applied universally. Rather - for every problem there is a specific order of steps you follow. Change the problem slightly, and everything goes downhill, students try to do stupid things. Heck, in high school I had a teacher who would give word problems with more information given then necessary to answer the question. We had a straight-A student stumped over it because he couldn't figure out what equations he had to invoke to use all the data! Education here does not push understanding the problem - it pushes memorizing solutions. So the kid in the OP's example sees '4 + 3 + 2 = ( ) ...', and ignores the rest of the statement. It's more of 'I know what to do with this set of symbols!', not 'what does this line say?' Someone here calls it a poorly debugged complier - but a compiler is worthless as a human being. Educating to understand the meaning of each individual symbol should produce students that have no issues understanding such new statements 99% of the time.
What I am trying to say: we should be trying to teach a language. There is no difference between "4 + 3 + 2 = ( ) + 2" and "sum of four, three, and two is equal to sum of something and two", and the remainder of the question is just "fill in the blank", which someone taking a test is keenly aware of. Understand the meaning of symbols - parsing is trivial for the human brain. Don't understand the meaning of symbols - and you are an outdated compiler.
On top of this: you folks are so obsessed with the variable... many times to date when teaching kids I found that having an empty space for a number is much easier than an x. Kid with no prior education in equations will attempt and likely succeed to solve an equation with variable listed as an empty box (mind you, I focus on teaching my students to understand individual symbols as words in a sentence). Put in an x without prior explanation - things go downhill fast. The variable itself is an abstraction that takes quite a bit of effort to understand, and many many people never understand at all (going through years of even college level education after).