{"id":498,"date":"2006-12-27T12:14:18","date_gmt":"2006-12-27T12:14:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=498"},"modified":"2014-11-18T20:21:03","modified_gmt":"2014-11-18T12:21:03","slug":"without-math-skills-who-gets-the-best-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/learn-math\/without-math-skills-who-gets-the-best-deal-498","title":{"rendered":"Without math skills, who gets the best deal?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There is a BBC news report on the poor level of mathematics skills among the British populace in <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/uk_news\/6211263.stm\">Poor maths 'fails' sale shoppers<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This sounds familiar:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The Department for Education and Skills says 14.9m people lack numeracy skills expected of an 11-year-old child.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>UK's Skills Minister Phil Hope says<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>...millions struggle to do the kind of basic sums that are so essential to our lives at work and at home<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Is it mathematics skills per se, or are we talking about mental arithmetic skills? Personally, I think mental arithmetic is still important, not only for day to day shopping calculations (\"15% off\", and the like) but also for estimating any mathematics problem before you start it. For a lot of students, getting some sort of answer seems to be the main goal. Once they have an answer, they move on. Incredibly, a lot of them don't even check whether it was right or wrong if the answers are provided. And what I find is that many students don't even estimate the answer before they start and so they have no idea whether their final answer is reasonable. Estimation requires a reasonable level of mental arithmetic skills.<\/p>\n<p>I found this interesting in the BBC article:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>...campaign staff will be handing out percentage calculators and encouraging shoppers to test themselves to see if they could improve their skills.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Hmm - will handing out calculators help shoppers improve their mental arithmetic?<\/p>\n<p class=\"alt\"><a href=\"#respond\" id=\"comms\">Be the first to comment<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Post-Christmas shoppers won't know if they have a bargain or not, because their numeracy skills are lacking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[127],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}