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can you answer this?

NoPoke

NoPoke

Active Member
Yesterdays Telegraph was banging on about the decline of mathematics as a subject taken prior to going to university. To highlight its case it gave two examples of maths problems given to first year prospective?? science undergraduates . One for the UK which involved a trivial calculation using Pythagoras and the Chinese equivalent which is much much harder.

I looked at the Chinese test and thinking back to my own A level maths course decided that I probably wouldn't be able to give the answers that I believe the examiner is seeking. I'd need my first year university maths for that. I would have been able to give partial answers but would have been puzzled by the 'obvious' errors in the questions.

So how about you? Could you answer the Chinese maths test?

http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2007/ChineseMaths.asp

online telegraph article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/25/nmaths25.xml
 
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In my 8th grade Advanced Math class, half of the students can't do long division on paper.

They're great at story problems, and using a graphing calculator though. :redface:

It might be smarter if we just started learning to speak Chinese, huh? :biggrin:

.
 
I took calculus prior to my first year of university. Does this test require anything above calculus to answer?
 
Try it and see.

It is 'just' calculus but at a level slightly higher than I was taught during high school. For example at high school I would have been unhappy with any question that asked me to find the angle between a pair of lines that were not co-planar.

The Royal Society of Chemists is offering a £500 prize, I wonder how many entries they will receive. I'll have to make sure that it is at least one!

It should take about 5 minutes to figure out if you can answer the question. And between 5 and 30 minutes to answer the whole thing depending upon how much calculus you can remember. I had to resort to drawings :(
 
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I got some geometry problem.

If I studied up again on my geo, I think I could have gotten it.
 
Wow that seems tougher than the Pokemon Trivia Contest that is going on.
 
I got a problem that asked me to show that two lines where perpendicular using geometric proofs - I took Geometry in 8th grade, so I just closed the window, because I don't remember that stuff. ;x
 
So who did vector calculus as high school? I know that I didn't. Which is why I would have had trouble using trigonometry ( a mathematical protractor) to measure the angle between two lines that don't intersect.
 
I actually didn't think I'd done vector calculus in high school, until I looked at my high school notes after a year or two of college and noticed that, while it wasn't done as "vector calculus," there were a stunning number of concepts we had to learn. Not just vector calculus, mind you, but for a whole ton of math concepts.

Anyway, the question in the OP is really bloody annoying and tedious (especially because the prism is poorly drawn given its stated dimensions unless I misread the given information), but not hard in the sense that it'd stump me for hours on end. Then again, I'm a math student, so that's not really saying much at all.
 
NoPoke said:
Try it and see.

It is 'just' calculus but at a level slightly higher than I was taught during high school. For example at high school I would have been unhappy with any question that asked me to find the angle between a pair of lines that were not co-planar.

The Royal Society of Chemists is offering a £500 prize, I wonder how many entries they will receive. I'll have to make sure that it is at least one!

It should take about 5 minutes to figure out if you can answer the question. And between 5 and 30 minutes to answer the whole thing depending upon how much calculus you can remember. I had to resort to drawings :(
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I was able to, and expected to, find angles between lines that weren't co-planar in 10th grade. That's three years before college. It was probably because I was in the IB program.

The thing is, I have a HORRIBLE memory. Absolutely terrible. On top of that, my teacher for 10th and 11th grade never made us memorize theorems or equations. He said it was unreasonable because if we were to ever take math at a higher level we would either have the equations at hand, or have used them so many times that the basics we were learning would simply be ingrained. Now that I haven't had a math class in over a year I barely remember calculus. I don't remember any equations, but if I were given the context of a problem, I could do a quick look-up of equations (the context would refresh my memory enough to know WHAT to look for) and probably solve it well enough. Isn't that what real life mathematics is about anyways? I don't need calculus in my field of study, and if I ever did need it, I could simply look it up.

And to answer your question, NoPoke, I did vector calculus in high school. I'm sure a lot of kids did.
 
10th grade? Thats age 13/14?

I'm surprised that you were expected to establish the angle between lines that aren't co-planar so early primarily because the concept of an angle in geometry and trigonometry trditionally requires the lines to intersect at some point on the plane. The extension to the concept of an angle to arbitrary lines in n-space was introduced as part of vector calculus. Since I was an engineering undergrad and we would typically play fast and loose with strict mathematical definitions I can't say if the trigonometric definition of a line was actually overturned or if the term "angle" wasn't modified with a qualifier to indicate that the two lines were being treated as vectors and their relative displacement in space being ignored.

Definitions and sylabus do change over time, so though I'm surprised that you would have been taught the extended idea of an angle of intersection between lines that don't intersect that doesn't mean that your recollection is incorrect, more likely that mine is in error. As it was a long time ago, it is possible that I was taught how to 'measure' the angle between non coplanar lines and I just can't remember. That was part of my motivation for posting the problem in the first place. To find out if the newspapers' assertion that standards are falling in the UK is correct by finding out if those closer to the target age of 17/18 can solve the problem.
 
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I don't remember any equations, but if I were given the context of a problem, I could do a quick look-up of equations (the context would refresh my memory enough to know WHAT to look for) and probably solve it well enough. Isn't that what real life mathematics is about anyways?
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It's actually pretty amusing. As a student, you're forced to memorize this, that, and the other, but if you actually do any work in the field of mathematics, you'll just look up anything you need anyway.

In short, memorizing equations is pretty much a student thing only. I find it hilarious.
 
Maril,

That was definately true for me. Up to age 16 in the UK lots of memory work and much less understanding. However from age 16 we were expected to understand what we were doing and basic formulae were usually given. Yea I finally don't have to remember all those stupid trig relationships! For me, at least, the exams at age 18 were simpler than those at age 16.

At university the same trend continued. Vector calculus and complex numbers and trig was consigned to the garbage bin. Big ideas leading to big simplifications. Unfortunately the exams got much much harder LOL.

And much like at university I made a clerical error in my answer to part (iii) no money for me LOL
 
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blastoise1992 said:
That seems like a version of a proof we wrote yesterday in school.

Back to back posts merged. The following information has been added:



I'll only be 15. =[
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Early Brithdays suck- *comforts*
I am one too

legal drinking age here is 18- it sucks, at the end of 12th Grade, everyone was out drinking, while I was still 17, and couldnt go into bars and pubs lol
 
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