From: Brian Walters
Quoting Rob Studdert <[email protected]>:
On 9 April 2013 06:30, John Sessoms <[email protected]> wrote:
Just out of curiosity, what real life problem does that equation relate to?
In solving electronics engineering problems this sort of combination
of operators wouldn't be that uncommon.
It's been long enough since I'd done school-book math that I had to
Google "order of operations" to be sure I got the answer right.
After watching that FB thread I feel that I'm in a privileged position
that my secondary schooling left me with an indelible memory of order
of operations (and we had no swanky acronyms, we just had to remember
it like times tables) plus I can solve trig problems so long as I have
a table or calculator handy and logs are no mystery. I can't help
thinking that if order of operations in second class mechanical maths
is a problem what change would anyone have had with basic algebra?
Yeah, I'm with John here. In my ancient schooldays, equations like
this would be presented with parentheses to define the order of
operations, as in:
6-(1x0)+(2/2) = 7
I'm not sure when the parentheses idea was dropped.
I recognized right away that it was one of those trick questions based
on order of operation. I got seven as the answer, but wasn't certain
enough that I remembered it correctly to accept the answer without
Googling Order of Operation to check myself.
When I had to take Trigonometry in High School it was all rote memory &
looking up tables. They didn't teach WHY.
I had to take a math course during one of my sojourns in Community
College, and enough time had passed since High School that they taught
Trig using graphing calculators. And in order to use graphing
calculators, they had to teach WHY.
Looking back, I can't believe that my High School Trig course never once
mentioned that Sine, Cosine and Tangent are all based on the
relationship of the sides of a triangle. That would have made it so easy.
And again, if I actually needed to figure out the height of a flagpole
from the length of it's shadow, nowadays I'd just Google it & find an
on-line calculator that would give me the answer.
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