There may likely be photos later. For now, try this. (and tell me what you get, 'cause I'm pretty sure I got it right, but the wording is stupid.)
"I drove 198 miles. I filled my car's gas tank and it took 7 and 1/3 gallons of gas to fill it. How far does my car travel on one gallon of gas?"
Lets see you invert some fractions now.
Posted by Sonya at January 14, 2003 04:09 PM198 3 594
--- X --- = --- = 27
1 22 22
Yay, math!
(I'm feeling discombobulated and unsettled and dissatisfied at work today, and I relish distractions in a way I'd previously thought impossible.)
Posted by: freesia at January 15, 2003 11:06 AMwell, crap. That doesn't look at ALL like it was supposed to look. Stupid comment!
Posted by: freesia at January 15, 2003 11:34 AMI got 27, too. Yay, math! It's been so long since I converted fractions I barely remembered how to do them. Did I tell you that when I took college entrance exams I got really high scores in advanced math and substantially lower scores in pre-algebra?
Holy shit, I graduated from high school 9 years ago.
Wow.
Posted by: Mol at January 15, 2003 11:44 AM27 is what I came up with, too.
Math was never my best subject -- I couldn't really fathom it beyond geometry, which I DID do well at, because I'm primarily a visually-oriented person. Folding those boxes on the Spacial Relations part of the SAT was a breeze for me; figuring out the square-root of a negative cardinal integer in base 3 makes my head hurt...
Posted by: THE COMTE at January 15, 2003 12:05 PMOkay... twenty-two thirds... a hundred and ninety-eight divided by twenty-two... um, nine times twenty-two would be, er, a hundred and eighty plust eighteen, so that's all right; and that means, like, nine miles to the third of a gallon, so that's three times that much per gallon, so that's twenty-seven.
This is why I failed algebra the first time I took it. No facility with notation. Even when I got to calculus I'd just stare at a problem for fifteen minutes or so, scribbling down columns of numbers to hold my place while I hopped to another part of the equation, then add the columns and write the answer after the equals sign. Which is fine when the answer is a rational number, which it almost always is in school problems. But it gives you zero useful skills for solving reality-based equations.
One million.
Posted by: Erin at January 15, 2003 12:36 PMDon't mind Erin. Apparently she's getting dumber.
Posted by: Joshua at January 15, 2003 12:53 PMI hated calculus so much that by the end of my junior year of high school, after I'd finished a year of it, I promised myself that I would never do math again. I totally forgot about the fact that I loved algebra and geometry and trig. D'oh.
(Stupid calculus.)
Posted by: freesia at January 15, 2003 01:03 PMSo what! It's not my fault I'm bad at math. It is Mr. Bailey's fault because he made too much fun of me and whenever I wore my cool ripped up jeans he would say "Erin, I'm gonna have to call your dad and tell him to plant another row of corn so he can buy you a new pair of pants." Plus Mr. Stolz yelled at me in the 9th grade and I almost cried and he also told me (in front of the whole class) that I wasn't as good at math as my sister.
Posted by: Erin at January 15, 2003 02:19 PMYeah, but when I was in 9th grade Mr. Stolz signed my year book "I think you know how I feel about you..."
Posted by: g. at January 15, 2003 04:40 PMHmm...you COULD just divide 198 by 7, which would get you a little more than 28 and just figure that if it took 7 ONE THIRD gallons, it must be a little LESS than that, and just guess 27, which would be right in the end. 'stead of inverting all those fractions and shit.
Posted by: vibegrrl at January 15, 2003 09:54 PM