Agronesia

Here’s a command for a set of questions from my brother’s elementary school math workbook (original language is Indonesian):

“Enter the most correct answer!”

And here’s one of the questions:

(1) “A fraction which is equal to 3/5 is …”

OK. So, 6/10 is obviously a correct answer to (1). 12/20 is also correct. Even 24/40 is correct.

Here’s the million dollar question: Which is the most correct?

Of course it’s a silly question. The answer to (1), mathematically, is either “correct” or “incorrect”. And among those many correct answers, neither is more correct than the others.

So, the wisest path is for the book writers to change to command to

“Enter a correct answer!” or even more simple and beautiful “Answer these questions!”

Or perhaps not answer anything at all, since we cannot find the most correct answer :).

Tags: bad mathematics, education, fractions, funny

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 9:20 pm by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under mathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.