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People who can't do basic math (pg. 4)
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| bas |
| quote: | Originally posted by jonze
most places have added gas surcharge on deliveries. |
Not Pizza Hut! |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by jonze
most places have added gas surcharge on deliveries. |
so how do you reconcile that with the fact that we pay more for petrol than the US does?
basically, what we've got is one study by god knows who that supposedly trumps every other study done to date? im not buying it. |
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| tubularbills |
| quote: | Originally posted by EXTREMUM
A deli clerk should know what 3/4 pounds looks like, on a digital scale. |
+((3/4)+(1/4))! |
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| Lira |
| Anyway, Brian, maybe it's not really a problem regarding Math, but a problem regarding language as a whole. She probably isn't used to thinking with fractions, and it is not part of her vocabulary at all. I remember once I told the handyman (who was fixing the water fountain), that I was absolutely parched. He looked at me and kept working. I repeated those same words, and he didn't do anything. Then, when I told him I told him I was "really thirsty", and only then he moved away and apologised. |
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| Spacey Orange |
| you were just asking wrong. you have to say, 'put a pound on it and then take a little off.' |
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| Ted Promo |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Anyway, Brian, maybe it's not really a problem regarding Math, but a problem regarding language as a whole. She probably isn't used to thinking with fractions, and it is not part of her vocabulary at all. I remember once I told the handyman (who was fixing the water fountain), that I was absolutely parched. He looked at me and kept working. I repeated those same words, and he didn't do anything. Then, when I told him I told him I was "really thirsty", and only then he moved away and apologised. |
He may have responded better if you had said "I'm 62% depleted of my water resources". |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Ted Promo
He may have responded better if you had said "I'm 62% depleted of my water resources". |
:p
The word I used in Portuguese sounded way more natural, I just didn't know how to translate that to English, heh. |
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| david.michael |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Anyway, Brian, maybe it's not really a problem regarding Math, but a problem regarding language as a whole. She probably isn't used to thinking with fractions, and it is not part of her vocabulary at all. I remember once I told the handyman (who was fixing the water fountain), that I was absolutely parched. He looked at me and kept working. I repeated those same words, and he didn't do anything. Then, when I told him I told him I was "really thirsty", and only then he moved away and apologised. |
In U S and A there is no excuse for not being able to order as such. It's pretty common here. High five. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Anyway, Brian, maybe it's not really a problem regarding Math, but a problem regarding language as a whole. She probably isn't used to thinking with fractions, and it is not part of her vocabulary at all. |
"Three quarters" and other simple fractional expressions are incredibly common in the U.S. After all, one of the coins in our currency is named after a fraction -- the "quarter." Anyone who has been here longer than a few months will know that three quarters = seventy-five cents, and I have no reason to think that she was a recent arrival to the U.S., as she spoke perfectly fluently and without any non-American accent. I'm pretty sure the problem was number-processing, not unfamiliarity with the expression "three quarters," especially given that she rephrased my "three quarters" as "three fourths" when she was confirming my request. |
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| EXTREMUM |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
"Three quarters" and other simple fractional expressions are incredibly common in the U.S. After all, one of the coins in our currency is named after a fraction -- the "quarter." Anyone who has been here longer than a few months will know that three quarters = seventy-five cents, and I have no reason to think that she was a recent arrival to the U.S., as she spoke perfectly fluently and without any non-American accent. I'm pretty sure the problem was number-processing, not unfamiliarity with the expression "three quarters," especially given that she rephrased my "three quarters" as "three fourths" when she was confirming my request. |
You should've thrown a curveball at her, and requested your chicken portion in kilograms. in fact, I'm going to try that, next time I go shopping. :stongue: |
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| Jarvmeister |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
Today I was ordering some chicken at the grocery store. I told the woman who has helping me that I wanted three-quarters of a pound. She repeats it back to me; "three-fourths of a pound?" I say, "Yeah."
She puts some chicken on the scale until the digital readout says like ".45 pounds" or something. Then she says, "Is that enough?"
I say, "I asked for three-quarters of a pound..."
And she says something like, "I know, but I don't know how much that is."
I almost said, "You have a scale right in front of you that tells you how much is on it," but then it dawned on me that she probably didn't know that the decimal form of "three-quarters" was ".75."
Then she put a little more on so that it read ".65" or something, and I didn't want to bother with her innumeracy anymore, so I left it at that and paid for the chicken... |
If it was me I wouldn't have been such a dick and told her how much 3/4 was.
She'd have been less embarrassed and you'd have been a decent person. |
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| eckmek |
| I can't ing believe you still don't have kilos and meters. It's incredible. |
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