Reply to post: Re: "Before Current Era arithmetic is useless"

Yay, more 'STEM' grads! You're using your maths degree to do ... what?

MonkeyCee

Re: "Before Current Era arithmetic is useless"

I"m the sort of sad git who does indeed do the calculations on my purchases and "sanity check" the till. What I find interesting is how many times the system gets it wrong, by mistake or design.

Some of them are things like differing shelf and till price, some times operator entered amounts are wrong (one of the local hardware stores always doubles the length of chain/wire bought by the meter). Or an item gets double swiped, and while it can seem very petty to most people, the store is still making a few % more profit on each sale. To quote my manager from my first real job (supermarket) "a good till girl can make you an extra hundred quid a week". Much the same way till scales are usually out by about 5-10 grams. 5 grams extra on your purchase of fruit doesn't add much, but 5 grams on every purchase adds up quite quickly.

But it's a "normal" math skill I thought, that you should be able to roughly estimate a result, either straight approximation, or by bounding (typically in the "will this be less than a tenner" type).

There is also a big difference between the various states of doing math. Making a proof requires a level of conscious understanding, hitting a cricket ball requires a level of computation that almost everyone would struggle with to do on paper, but we'll readily do the real world calculation.

As for probability, risk and statistics, anyone who REALLY understands them should be able to eat your lunch at poker.

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