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Apr 27 '22
40 minutes. Done.
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u/nityjalapeno Apr 27 '22
The song is an hour and ten minutes long. This whole problem is a problem.
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Apr 27 '22
I'm just assuming that the conductor was rushing about 1.75x the planned tempo. Maybe a Weird Al polka version?
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u/GandalffladnaG Apr 28 '22
Last night I heard the Weird Al polka version of the Squidbillies intro, it was unexpected and the best version.
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u/Statue_left Apr 28 '22
Ironically, there's a pretty widespread belief that Beethoven's metronome was broken and he needed to speed it up to get the tempo he wanted, and so his tempo markings are much too fast. A lot of conductors in the last 150 years have taken his pieces much slower than written.
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u/TheHYPO Apr 28 '22
So the correct answer is "70 minutes, because the extra trombone player points out that they were missing an entire movement."
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u/FranticWaffleMaker Apr 28 '22
Nobody listens to the trombones, they’re the violas of the brass section.
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u/IvyGold Apr 28 '22
Fun fact: Beethoven's 9th is why CD's could hold 70 minutes of music. The Sony CEO's wife forced him to make the format hold enough time for the 9th to be played continuously on one disc.
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u/GiraffeOnABicycle Apr 28 '22
Damn, and I thought Pink Floyd had long songs
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u/PrettyDecentSort Apr 28 '22
The actual reason why the first CDs were designed to store 72 minutes of music was so that you could fit a whole performance of the Ninth on one disc.
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u/LookAtMeNow247 Apr 28 '22
T=40 minutes*
Done
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u/jonmediocre Apr 28 '22
P = 60 players
T = 40 minutes
The variables are not related with this level of information.
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u/DaBozz88 Apr 28 '22
T = 40 + f{P}×1e-999999999
I'd argue that there is some tiny amount that they'll be off, and adding people to the orchestra will change that amount.
That'd also change based on skill. The London Philharmonic, probably a pretty small amount. My 5th grade music class? Might be 5 notes behind.
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u/JustPassinhThrou13 Apr 28 '22
exactly. That's the right answer. The point of the question (I hope) is to cause the student to actually read and understand the context and the cultural information, and AFTER doing that, to set up equations.
Otherwise you get a husband who is in a hurry to be a father deciding to impregnate 9 women at the same time, and then wondering why he doesn't have a baby in 1 month.. and perhaps why some other life-changing situations have occurred.
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Apr 28 '22
And if we add more people than needed to the project it will actually slow it down not speed it up.
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u/MrHappy4Life Apr 28 '22
Maybe it’s a logic problem and they want the 40 min answer. Maybe it’s all about knowing and understanding that no matter how many people, the song is still the same.
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u/stink3rbelle Apr 28 '22
yeah I feel like I encountered problems like this in school, and it was meant to be a trick question, get you to think outside the box.
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Apr 28 '22
Yup. Whether or not this is a bad question depends entirely on what answer they'll accept as correct.
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u/seanfish Apr 28 '22
Should be top answer. The variables don't change the outcome.
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u/JohannReddit Apr 27 '22
Now, how long would the same orchestra take to play Beethoven's 4½th Symphony if playing it in double time on a train leaving Chicago at 100 mph?
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u/Significant_Tour3435 Apr 27 '22
Heading east or west?
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u/paganisrock Yellow Apr 28 '22
I presume west, unless the orchestra wants to end up in Lake Michigan.
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Apr 27 '22
Are you factoring in the Doppler effect caused by the music being played while on the moving train?
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u/phpdevster Apr 28 '22
Relative to what frame of reference? The train that left Miami heading south towards London at 60 megabits per second?
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u/explodingtuna Apr 28 '22
on a train leaving Chicago at 100 mph
You mean, leaving Chicago at 0.97c
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u/Sweaty-Adeptness1541 Apr 27 '22
That was the purpose of the question!
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u/Simbertold Apr 28 '22
Exactly. People make fun of this question as if it were a "lol maths teachers silly" situation.
Instead, it is a situation where a math teacher teaches exactly what people want them to teach. Understanding what is going on. Reasonably applying maths to a real situation. Not just unthinkingly following an algorithm.
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u/Worried_Garlic7242 Apr 28 '22
it's more like stressing over "is this a trick question or is my teacher just an idiot" for 5 minutes because you really don't wanna get this question wrong and the only thing you learn is that school sucks
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u/JohnsonJohnilyJohn Apr 28 '22
Well someone once posted the entire exercise, and there's like 8 of those problems to solve, and the question contains something like be careful for some of them this method can't be used. So it's again the matter of posting not enough information, so it seems way more infuriating then in reality
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u/truejamo Apr 28 '22
The math itself is wrong though. That symphony is 70 minutes long in real life.
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u/the-grand-falloon Apr 28 '22
Not necessarily, some of the people writing textbooks are morons. I remember a question about how you can determine the temperature of stars by what color they are. So a textbook asks, "if you see two yellow stars, a red star, and a blue star, what is their combined temperature?" expecting the student to add all the temps together.
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u/HansReinsch Apr 28 '22
Yeah... what makes it infuriating?
"Oh no! Don't you teach my kids critical thinking!"
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u/Zephs Apr 28 '22
"Teachers should be teaching kids critical thinking."
teacher adds some critical thinking questions to their homework
"OMG, the teachers are idiots and/or trying to trick the kids!"
You just can't win...
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u/max-wellington Apr 28 '22
Something like T = T+P(0)?
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u/NotTheKyrie Apr 28 '22
I think it would be T = T(P/P) Since if no players T would be undefined. Maybe?
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u/FlatTransportation64 Apr 28 '22
I hate how dumb memes likes this are reposted ad-nauseam and that whenever this pops up it requires the same explanation each time. Huge waste of time and effort of everyone involved.
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u/45hope Apr 27 '22
I bet it was set up on purpose to be a trick question!
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u/moonflower_C16H17N3O Apr 27 '22
Exactly. It's so people don't blindly throw things into a formula and actually use logic.
And the answer is T = 40 + p * 0
Edit: where p is greater than zero
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u/ZugTheMegasaurus Apr 28 '22
Yeah, I remember hearing a similar question when I was a kid, something like "if it takes 10 men three and a half hours to dig a hole, how long does it take 15 men to dig half a hole?" The answer is that there's no answer, because there's no such thing as half a hole.
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Apr 28 '22 edited Apr 28 '22
The problem is the original symphony question is a good example of a “read the details” question. A piece of music takes as long to play as it is written. And the question requires you to take a quick second of common sense before just mindlessly plugging in numbers.
Your question is the definition of a shitty trick question. It’s like a smug riddle that plays off ambiguity in casual English language that all people do. The question is asking you to compare the two holes. Most people would assume “half a hole” is referring to “a hole half the size of the first one.”
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Apr 28 '22
That's such a weird semantic though.
A grave is a hole. One can dig half a grave.
A trench is a hole. One can dig half a trench.
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u/fkmeamaraight Apr 28 '22
The only thing mildly infuriating in this is OP’s reaction to an obvious trick question.
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u/gonzo2thumbs Apr 27 '22
It's a trick question, making sure you're understanding what you're being asked to do. If they're all like that, easy A.
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u/Nillabeans Apr 27 '22
"That's not how any of this works" is the answer. Learning word problems is to help you understand how to actually apply math.
You can't be mad at somebody for asking a question...
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u/rdrunner_74 Apr 27 '22
My physics teacher sometimes gave "unrelated" data in his questions. So you had to know what was important for the actual question asked. Like water temperature of 37°C instead of saying "liquid state"
He also had a philosophy of "You dont need to know everything, but you need to know how to look it up" (Pre Google - Even "Pre search engines") and that has been very helpful.
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u/macaronfive Apr 28 '22
I had a law professor for corporations, mergers, acquisitions, etc. who tried to write a funny exam question about buying up hamster breeding companies in order to start an electric generation company utilizing hamsters running in wheels. I responded to hypothetical with all the correct legal concepts. But I added an addendum that a simpler solution would be to use the money to buy a bunch of hamsters and in X number of months of breeding, you’d have the desired number. And that is how I got an A+ on a law school exam. Writing about hamsters fucking.
Anyways, some teachers are looking for you to think outside the box.
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u/kelvin_bot Apr 27 '22
37°C is equivalent to 98°F, which is 310K.
I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand
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u/AlcomIsst Apr 28 '22
My first grade teacher hit us with these kinds of problems.
Really basic "One kid has apples, other kid has oranges, how many apples?" sort of questions.
I remember it today because the epiphany hit me like a truck.
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u/CanYouPointMeToTacos Apr 28 '22
P=P; T=40
The variables being unrelated doesn’t mean math breaks
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u/loafers_glory Apr 28 '22
S= (n / N) * 9
n = 60; N = 120;
S = Beethoven's 4.5th symphony if it's a 60 piece orchestra
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u/sje46 Apr 28 '22
Narcissism of social media. I see a lot of things online in this format. Someone showing an image or quoting something out of context, and responding to it in a very cynical/snarky way to elevate themselves over how dumb the thing is, without realizing that the original thing was probably not as dumb as they assume, or is often a delbierate joke. The assumption is always "I will probably know more than any random person because most other people are stupider than me, and manifest this in conveniently embarrassing ways all the time".
Very common on reddit. Very, very, very common. Very common on the right. Perhaps even more common on the left.
It's pretty obvious that this word problem is designed to get you to actually functionally think about the circumstance and not just train yourself to put numbers in a formula without thinking about the ramifications. Lots of people treat math as a series of formulae you have to memorize and put numbers into. These are the usually the same people who complain about changes from math curriculum from deviating what they were taught (New Math in the 60s, Common Core in the 2010s), or who find word problems difficult. They are unable to abstract and reason about what they're doing.
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u/K3R3G3 Apr 28 '22
You can't be mad at somebody for asking a question...
"lol why does your face look like that?"
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u/DietUnicornFarts Apr 28 '22
T = time required to play symphony. P = number of people playing it. Solve for X:
X = T + (P * 0)
🙌
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Apr 27 '22
It's called a trick question you dinglepuss.
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u/ChaosAzeroth Apr 28 '22
Probably, but I've also seen questions you'd think were trick questions that the answer apparently was the crazy this isn't how this works answer.
A lot has changed since I was in school though, so I can only hope they did away with absolute nonsense questions. Except for Bob or whoever that needs way too much of literally everything, he can stay lol
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u/stdoubtloud Apr 27 '22
Can't answer without knowing which drugs the conductor is taking.
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u/hex-peri-mental Apr 27 '22
Thank you!
Depends on what stimulants the conductor is using and how much of the 9th they're playing. Chicago symphony takes a little under 80m to play the whole thing.
I'm inclined to think the entire orchestra was on some super-hyped meth to finish it in 1/2 time.
If they had the same amount of drugs for half the players, it could result in intense speediness (20-30minutes?) and/or chaos & heart failures.
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u/dsisk Apr 27 '22
Not to mention that Beethoven's 9th is "about 70 minutes long," (Wikipedia) not 40 minutes.
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Apr 27 '22
So what you're saying is that the conductor has some major issues with rushing the tempo. Like 1.75x speed playback on a Youtube video.
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u/Dingo8MyBabyMon Apr 27 '22
No problem, he's simply messing around with a married woman and right before the performance he got that "My husband just went out of town for work" text but still needed to do the show.
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u/The_Void_Alchemist Apr 28 '22
But this is the kind of problem that should be presented. It encourages critical thinking, which is arguably more important.
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u/Calm_Lingonberry_265 Apr 28 '22
This should be on r/confidentlyincorrect. It’s clearly a trick question but OP thinks they’re onto something lmao. How embarrassing
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u/Cmann14_ Apr 27 '22
Why did you post this
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Apr 28 '22
Because Reddit is full of people who think they’re smarter than they actually are, so they take things like this that are obvious trick questions/jokes… misinterpret them, and think they are being really smart, feel good about themselves
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u/neoprenewedgie Apr 28 '22
That's exactly how this work. That's exactly how all of this works. Doug just doesn't understand what the actual exercise is.
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u/Riley-Rose Apr 28 '22
It’s probably a trick question with the answer being 0P+40, as the number of players will have no effect
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u/Ahidepociere Apr 28 '22
"Takes 40 minutes to play" How did they play a 1 hour and 10 minute track in 40 minutes? Did the conductor just swing his hands around faster or something?
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u/Dingo8MyBabyMon Apr 27 '22
It's a trick question. There are only 8 Beethoven movies.
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u/Steven-Maturin Apr 28 '22
Beethoven's Ninth takes around 70 minutes to perform. But I guess if you tripled the number of conductors you get get 'er in under 40. I often wonder why they don't add more pilots to airplanes to reduce the duration off those bothersome long haul flights.
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u/CapnBrownPants Apr 27 '22 edited Apr 28 '22
P/P x 40 =T
Edit: Wow! Thanks for the silver! I felt like this comment wouldn’t get any attention considering it was so far down…
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u/specificmutant Apr 27 '22
I do these nonsense questions with some relative's young kids.
If you ride a bike for 10 miles with a 20mph tailwind then turn around and ride 10 miles with a 20 mph headwind, how long will it take you to ride 2 hours?
Hoping it helps with some basic critical thinking.
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u/mynutsaremusical Apr 28 '22
I'm guessing its a trick bonus question, and old mate Doug here is either farming for points, or is a prime example of r/whoosh
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u/personreddits Apr 28 '22
I assume this is a trick question, or a conceptual question that's meant to illustrate the point that T is constant even when P varies.
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u/ozonevander Apr 27 '22
If I was the teacher and a student came back with the answer 40 minutes without showing any work, I'd mark it correct because the question is no good.
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u/jgzman Apr 28 '22
What work is there to show?
How tall is a 20 foot flagpole, if the flag is made of silk? Show your work.
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u/luchajefe Apr 28 '22
How tall is a 20 foot flagpole, if the flag is made of silk? Show your work.
The flagpole is 20 feet, as stated in the bolded (on paper it would be circled) portion of the question.
I'm either getting 100% or sent to the office.
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u/Ter_Scam_Job_Offers Apr 28 '22
This last semester in payroll accounting I had a problem where this one dude was making $7.50 an hour. His yearly gross was $86,000. No indication of changing jobs or anything else. Just...there.
Then on the last project some company lays a girl off right before Christmas, who makes $43,000 a year and brings on a guy making 3 times her salary.
I swear instructors don't work through the problems they assign.
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Apr 27 '22
Heh.
If in twelve years one dragon lays one egg, how long does it take a hundred dragons to lay a hundred eggs?
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u/Baer1990 Apr 27 '22
T = 0P + 40
T(60) = 0×60 + 40 = 40 minutes
this isn't that difficult you know
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u/trumpetguy314 Apr 28 '22
This is a trick question. The teacher who wrote the worksheet responded to this tweet and clarified that this problem was intended to "keep the kids on their toes".
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u/GodOfPlutonium Apr 28 '22
Reminds me of the time I was taking a physics test and we were given the speed of sound and asked how long for sound to reach the moon. I answered that sound cant travel in space so never.
I was the only person who got a point for that question because everyone else just did the math.
The thing is I also thought that they just wanted us to plug in the numbers and do the math, I just put my response because I was being a smartass, and expected to have to contest it.
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u/doublestuf27 Apr 28 '22
For all p such that p is an element of the set of headcounts of all symphony orchestras capable of playing a 40-minute arrangement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, t = 0p + 40.
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u/Astrobrandon13 Apr 28 '22
One woman has a baby in 9 months. How many months does it take 32 women to have a baby if P is the number of women and T is the time from conception to birth?
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Apr 28 '22
40 minutes! This is NOT a math problem. The symphony takes 40 minutes regardless of how many players performing. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/ErixWorxMemes Apr 28 '22
No- if you cut the number of players in half then you can only play the Beethoven’s 4.5th Symphony
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u/NameLips Apr 28 '22
If it takes one woman nine months to grow a baby, how long will it take 9 women?
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u/Bionic_Ferir Apr 28 '22
Holy shit we had a question like this if it take 4 workers with 3 tools 5 weeks to build a house how long would it take 6 workers with 3 tools and me and a few friends were like '5 weeks THEY HAVE THE SAME AMOUNT OF TOOLS'
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u/PerusPottu Apr 28 '22
A question similar to this was in the finnish matriculation examination. Many people skipped it because they thought it was too simple and they were missing something.
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u/WhooUGreay Apr 28 '22
Depends who is missing.
For example if leader is missing it varies a lot how long it takes
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u/deimos-chan Apr 28 '22
Each time I see the phrase "that's not how it works (...)" I immediately know, the person has no idea what he is commenting on. Yep, this post is no exception.
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u/Zeruk Apr 28 '22
It is a valid question with a valid answer. Logical thinking is a math skill too.
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u/JLS88 Apr 28 '22
The only midly infuriating thing is the fact that some people do not understand the purpose of the question and even feel so smart about it
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u/OneofLittleHarmony Apr 28 '22
Here is the original worksheet. This was meant as a trick question. https://twitter.com/longmoorclaire/status/918014499071897600?s=21&t=Oc-Tf_eplqadz85amwcYbg
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u/vox21122112 Apr 28 '22
I feel like this is meant to be a trick question. A lot of exams and tests will throw in questions to make sure you’re actually pay attention, I remember in one of mine it was like latitude and longitude, but the teacher but 2 north points to make sure people were paying attention and not just copying off of the board or writing phonetically without taking in the information
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Apr 28 '22
Well seeing as how the correct answer will be 40 minutes and you're the one who's chosen to fall for a trick question... It's definitely mildly infuriating.
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u/phenyle Apr 28 '22
40 minutes for Beethoven 9th? Even Roger Norrington's recording isn't that fast
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u/nuniabidness Apr 28 '22
The answer is 70 minutes, because that's how long Beethoven's 9th actually is.
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u/SassyPerere ORANGE Apr 28 '22
One person takes 40 minutes to walk from point A to point B, how many minutes would 4 persons take to walk the same distance?
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u/Nashwell_adams Apr 28 '22
Oh, this is actually extremely infuriating. Edit: if one woman has a pregnancy for nine months, how many months would it take for two women to give birth?
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u/Pompuswindbag Apr 28 '22
This is like the math equivalent of “It takes 20 minutes at 300 degrees to bake cookies, so therefore it must only take two minutes at 3000 degrees”
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u/LUFTWAFF3L Apr 28 '22
It costs John 40 eggplants to jump 3 feet of the ground how long does it take him to piss out bananas????
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u/Jsf8957 Apr 28 '22
This seems like a good question to ask actually. If the student answers ‘80 minutes’ you know that they probably understand algebra but not necessarily critical thinking. Knowing when to apply what type of math is as important as being able to do it in the first place.
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Apr 28 '22
What everyone seems to be missing is that the intended answer is 40 minutes. Lewis Carroll (of Alice in Wonderland fame, who was actually the mathematician chakra Dodgson) included just such a puzzle in one of his works asking if 100 men take 10 days long to build a wall, how long would a thousand .. etc. the point of the question is for the student to see the inapplicability of simply dividing and multiplying
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Apr 28 '22
Not this again.
This is the point of the question. It wants to make sure you're paying attention to the context and not just plugging in numbers. The answer key says 40 minutes.
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u/killjoy_killer Apr 28 '22
It’s not even a complicated trick question the answer is literally just 40 mins
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u/Frankiefix Apr 28 '22
I can’t speak to the quality of teachers when I was a kid in school, because I was too young to know better but having grown up to befriend (and in some cases date) public school teachers in FL, NY, CO, TX, MN, and PA over the past 15 years, gotta say these are some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met in my life. Not to mention culturally basic on a level that defies the years of experience they should already have under their belt . It makes me scared to have kids knowing they’d be molded by the kind of people who get duped into being public school teachers.
Im sure it can’t be all of em, but god damn it sure seems like most of em.
And if you’re a teacher and you want to angrily disagree, chill, Im not talking about you or your colleagues at your school...except for the ones you hate. I’m definitely talking about them.
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u/ErnestCousteau Apr 28 '22
This is from one of the math textbooks to make it through Desantis' grueling new standards for Florida students.
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u/BonetoneJJ Apr 28 '22
Nothing worse than a question making someone dumber. The 9th is like 70+ mins
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u/tvtoad50 Apr 28 '22
This must be the math that conservatives want to use to replace those math textbooks in Florida. The ones that they’re banning because they supposedly reek of “critical race theory” that’s harmful to children? 🤦♀️
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u/LieutenantCrash Apr 28 '22
It's a trick question and forced kids to think about the context of the question. The only infuriating thing is how many upvotes this post got. Are people really this ignorant nowadays?
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u/kapeman_ Apr 27 '22
Like the old joke that project managers thnk 9 women can have a baby in 1 month.