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(Excerpted from Stop Getting Ripped Off) Have a look at this question, and see how quickly you can answer it. Look at the menu below. If you order a Lancaster Special sandwich and onion soup, how much should you leave for a 10% tip?
The question isn’t hard. The Special costs $1.95 and the soup 60 cents, for a total of $2.55. Ten percent of that is 25.5 cents. Let’s say either 25 or 26 cents is an acceptable answer. If you answered this question correctly, consider yourself part of an elite group, because when the U.S. Department of Education asked U.S. adults to answer it as part of a nationwide study, only 42 percent answered correctly. Less than half of American adults were able to pick two numbers from a list, add them, and then perform the most basic of all percentage calculations – simply moving the decimal point one column to the right to calculate 10 percent. You might be surprised by this abysmal performance. But then, if you think about your last dinner with a group of friends, perhaps you won’t be. Remember that dreaded moment when the bill came, and the splitting began? Cell phones and calculators were whipped out. Shrugs swept around the table. Finally, most of you gave up and threw down $20 bills or credit cards. College-educated, successful professionals are regularly brought to their knees by vexing math problem like this: Add up a burger, half a plate of nachos, an iced tea, and tax, then divide by two. Heck, you’ve probably seen people melt merely at the prospect of calculating a 20 percent tip (Here’s how: move the decimal point one to the left and double the result. If the bill is $45.13, take 4.51 and double it. A $9 tip will do the trick. – now you don’t have to pay for that iPhone Tipulator app). What’s going on here? Can’t Americans add and subtract? In a word, no. That lunch tip question might have reminded you of a pesky word problem from high school math. Perhaps some folks who could easily calculate 10 percent of $2.55 suffer a bit of brain lock when asked a question like that in paragraph form. Still, it’s a very real-life query. And so is the question below. Have a look, then guess how many Americans guessed wrong when they were asked:
You need to buy peanut butter and are deciding between two brands. Estimate the cost per ounce of the creamy peanut butter. Write your estimate on the line provided____________________________________________________
Again, not a difficult problem. If this were a math class in high school, I would immediately recognize what is sometimes called “freshman logic.” The numbers were designed to work out fairly evenly, to avoid leaving behind students who have trouble with decimals. If peanut butter costs $1.59 per pound – and there are 16 ounces in a pound – the price is close to 10 cents. Or, you could take another, just-as-easy route. If 20 ounces costs $1.99, then simple division tells you that one ounce must cost about 10 cents. Division, however, is a bridge too far for most Americans. When this question was asked by the Department of Education, 6 out of 10 adults gave the wrong answer. Perhaps you are sympathetic to the plight of students who identify themselves as “verbal” vs. mathematical, and division is often where many of the math un-inclined trip up. But look at it this way: This isn’t a division problem. It’s a basic life problem. A consumer who missed this question really isn’t qualified to shop at a grocery store. That means 6 in 10 adults probably get cheated every time they buy bread and milk. What do you suppose happens to them when they are sitting with the financing manager at the back room of a car dealership?
Certainly, this problem involves slightly more advanced skill than the earlier questions. In the end, however, it’s a simple matter of subtracting two numbers (43,083-42,775) to get mileage driven and then dividing the result by the number of gallons used: 12.5. Test-takers accepted pretty good guesses – basically anything between 24 and 24. Yet the results were dismal. Only 29 percent answered correctly.
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