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Entry 575, on 2007-07-18 at 18:31:06 (Rating 2, News)

I read on the BBC News web site today that a recent survey found that over 7% of adults aged 18 to 25 were unable to answer a simple maths problem intended for eight year old children. The question was: what is one eighth of 32? The answers were: a) 6 b) 4 c) 2 d) 8 e) None of these f) Don't know.

Another finding was that people over 55 were able to answer similar problems correctly at a significantly higher rate than those who were 18 to 25, who would have done school maths much more recently. They also suggested that school leavers weren't even able to add a series of numbers effectively.

Its difficult to understand how a person could spend many years at school and, no matter how poor their abilities or the standard of teaching, not be able to do something so simple. Even if the system was only 1% efficient there should still be a better outcome than that. Its not like this is calculus which the average person never needs in their everyday life, these are basic maths skills which have real practical applications.

Its too easy to say that this is just another sign of the failure of our education systems, or the dumbing down of testing methodology, or just a general sign of the degradation of our civilisation in general, but I think all of these statements have some merit.

The question many people will ask is how should we fix this problem, but I think its more realistic to ask does it really matter? There will always be a percentage of people who are hopeless at certain subjects (most notably maths) and there are still billions of smart people on the planet, so I say let's not worry about it. These people can obviously survive OK without even basic maths skills, so they should be able to get on with what they can do well and forget about doing division problems!

I haven't done any testing yet myself, but I suspect that most people I know would be able to answer this, but I do work at a University. Just in case you aren't sure yourself, and just for your information, the answer is b) 4.

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