The REAL Answer Explained
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- Опубліковано 7 лют 2018
- Media outlets around the world went crazy over a 5th grade math exam question in China. But they all missed the real story! The problem actually dates back to French researchers in 1979. In this video I present the real story to the viral "Chinese" captain's age question.
The REAL Answer To The Viral Chinese Math Problem "How Old Is The Captain?"
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Update thanks to comment from Markus Schüt: the origin dates back to 1841 in a letter Flaubert wrote! See:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_...
My blog post for this video:
wp.me/p6aMk-5rE
Captain's age question
"If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats onboard, how old is the ship's captain?"
South China Morning Post
www.scmp.com/news/china/societ...
The Portal (Chinese)
www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_for...
RT
www.rt.com/news/417231-china-...
BBC
www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-ch...
Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com/news/w...
Newsweek
www.newsweek.com/can-you-solve...
Official response (Chinese).
news.sina.com.cn/s/wh/2018-01-...
Sherlock Holmes' deduction in The Hound of the Baskervilles
www.quora.com/What-are-some-o...
Novotná, Jarmila, and Bernard Sarrazy. "Model of a professor’s didactical action in mathematics education: professor’s variability and students’ algorithmic flexibility in solving arithmetical problems." The Fourth Congress of the European Society in Mathematics Education. 2005.
www.erme.tu-dortmund.de/~erme/...
de Corte, Eric, Brian Greer, and Lieven Verschaffel, eds. Making Sense of Word Problems. CRC Press, 2000. Pages 3-5.
books.google.com/books?id=OOy...
Reusser, Kurt. "Problem solving beyond the logic of things: Contextual effects on understanding and solving word problems." Instructional Science. 17.4 (1988): 309-338.
files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED...
Benjamin Dickman Twitter and tweet
/ 960304080462798851
Benjamin Dickman answer on Math Educators Stack Exchange
matheducators.stackexchange.c...
Gene Wirchenko blog
genew.ca/solving-the-right-pro...
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The entire worldwide media missed the actual history of this problem! Please tweet this at any news organization that posted a story so they can share the real story dating back to French researchers in 1979.
Update comment from Markus Schütz (also noted in tweet by Benjamin Dickman): "Actually the origin goes back to 1841: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_captain. In french speaking areas "... and what's the captain's age?" is a very popular saying when someone tells you a story with many unrelated details, or poses a problem in a very complicated wording, or gives you an unsolvable problem. And everyone knows that the correct answer is always "42" ;-)"
Also, some minor clarifications/corrections and one elaboration:
3:06 - A more accurate description is: Benjamin Dickman, who has a Ph.D. in Mathematics Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and currently teaches math at The Hewitt School, an all girls day school in New York City. Benjamin believes such problems are well-known to math education researchers, specifically those with interests in sense-making, problem solving, and problem posing.
5:02 - the blog "has other posts, too"
Gene Wirchenko suggested elaborating the ending of the video with this point: (genew.ca/solving-the-right-problem-right/)
"Mathematical tools have requirements for their use. For example, if one has two of voltage, current, and resistance for some types of electrical circuits, one can compute the third using the formula E=IR. BUT you must have two of the values. If you only have one of them, you do not have enough information.
"In a real world problem, you may have to hunt down the missing information. Sometimes, you can compute a missing value from other information given in the problem.
"For example, in the problem 'Albert has 25 marbles more than Carl does. Beth has 45 marbles. Carl has 15 fewer marbles than Beth. How many marbles does Albert have?', Albert has c + 25 marbles. We do not know the value of c, but we do know that c = b - 15. That still is not enough, but since we know b = 45, we can substitute 45 for b to get c = 45 - 15 = 30 and then for c in a = c + 25 to get a = 30 + 25 = 55. Thus, Albert has 55 marbles."
MindYourDecisions this question was still asked 12 years ago, when i was in the first grade (in germany).
And question like this one only ocurred in the primary school, in my opinion that s kinda sad.
Actually the origin goes back to 1841 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_captain). In french speaking areas "... and what's the captain's age?" is a very popular saying when someone tells you a story with many unrelated details, or poses a problem in a very complicated wording, or gives you an unsolvable problem.
And everyone knows that the correct answer is always "42" ;-)
It gets lost in translation.
For a lot of students, the assumption is that the question is on a math test and therefore the teacher thinks there is an answer, so to avoid being marked wrong, you use the numbers in the problem to guess at a solution. All of us who watch your channel will have seen questions where we know what the correct answer is, and also know what the teacher thinks the "correct" answer is, and depending on how obstinate we are that day, we either give the correct answer and are marked wrong, or give the answer that will satisfy the teacher, despite it being incorrect. The real solution here is to teach teachers that they must make it clear that students are allowed to think for themselves, and should not assume that the teacher is always right, or that a test question always has an answer.
I've seen this thing referred to as "cargo cult arithmetic" - someone who doesn't understand mathematics, but has observed that manipulating symbols in certain ways gives what's then declared to be the correct answer.
Then there's the related phenomenon where someone sees an expression like "half of (x squared)" writes it out in symbols, then cancels the 2s and ends up with x...
Another thing that comes up depressingly often is the student who, when given a "show that [expression]" sets out boldly, makes a simple mistake early on (flips a sign or omits a term moving from one line to the next), carries through the rest of the algebra correctly, and arrives at something that's in no way equivalent to the required expression, and then writes as their next line "therefore [expression] as required". My policy when marking such things is to give method marks based on the quality of the algebra, and knock off (roughly) a mark for the incorrect assertion at the end. If a student just trails off, then they still get the method marks without losing anything, and a student who's confident/aware enough to write something that makes it clear they realise they've gone wrong somewhere gets the method marks and the mark for the correct answer (last batch of marking I did was ~600 papers, and only 2 students both made a simple mistake in their algebra on such a question and made it clear they recognised that fact - while maybe ten times as many bluffed that it led to the correct answer.
If it's clear that the student is bluffing that their algebra will lead to the correct answer, but they haven't made a mistake yet, then they get method marks for however far they did get, and marks for the correct answer if they got far enough, so, under time pressure, there's an element of double-or-nothing in there...
Luke has 5 apples, he gives 3 apples to John.
Calculate the mass of the Sun.
Lol
Assuming each apple is a planet, they all revolve around the sun in 365 days and rotate completely within a day, so 8 planets and a big sun let’s say the speed of light is 322,000 miles a second, so if we travel around it in speed of light, and now I wasted ur time reading this
@@amiwrong7429 no you're not wrong
Luke giving the apples to John symbolizes the carbon atoms fusing into the hydroelectric source of electrons inside the suns innermost core producing cosmic inflation which creates the outer shell of the neutron star which has an approximate mass of 6.4 billion strange quarks per Planck length. According to those calculations, the sun is about 406 apples. Only true big brains would have known this.
1.989×1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms
A school inspector visited a class and asked the students, "If the price of a dozen of bananas is 10 dollars, then what is my age?" One of the students promptly answered ''50". "That's correct", the inspector replied delightedly, 'but how could you figure that out so quickly?' The student said, 'we have a neighbor of age 25, who is half-mad. But you are completely mad, so it must be 50.'
😂😂
Epic xD
Lol 😂😂
অসাধারণ উত্তর। 👌
That student?
Alber….. wait no, Elon Musk.
I feel compelled to provide the counterpoint. In my grade school class, I was asked this question: “Judy has 7 apples. John has 5 oranges. How many apples do they have together?” I answered 7. The teacher marked it wrong and indicated that the answer was 12. When I showed her the paper, my mother was infuriated. She went to the school to complain. She was told that apples or oranges does not matter; the idea was to teach addition. That was over 50 years ago, when US schools were supposedly top notch and teacher pay was much better than today.
Teacher pay was not better, life was just more affordable
@@carsonlove531 point taken.
😂😂🤦🏿♂️
Personally I wouldn't have that
That's just an example of an extremely incompetent math teacher. The solution to 7x+5y is not 12 (except if x=y), even, or especially when you teach addition.
I was asked this question as a kid, but there was a different spin to it. It was worded: "Imagine, on YOUR ship there are...", and then had a long list of random stuff found on the ship to make the student forget the crucial information from the very beginning: that THEY are the captain, so the correct answer is their own age :)
Yes, I thought about this riddle, too.
Saying that it's your ship doesn't automatically make you the captain. For example, it can mean that you are the owner, a member of the crew or simply a passenger. I have often referred to the train I was waiting for at a station as "my train".
@@khymaaren It's a riddle for kids, it's not that deep lmao
It's a quick lesson in what's wrong with social media that 50% of the comments so far focused on the original posters lazy re-wording of a decades old riddle rather than accepting the salient fact that the riddle's point was introducing an important fact in a way that you are likely to ignore once you start hearing what you perceive to be a math problem. My recollection of these kinds of riddles is that they were more careful in their language, saying things like, "Pretend you are the captain of a ship. Now, when you get to port, they load..." And by the time your brain starts doing the math, you've forgotten the premise. Another variation was, "say you are a bus driver. At your first stop X people get on. At the second stop, Y people get on and Z people get off.". It then goes on for a few more stops and human psychology is such that your brain can't help focusing on the math even though it hasn't been mentioned yet that the riddle is going to end in a question about the number of people left on the bus at the end. By the time it gets to the end and the final question turns out to be "how old is the driver?" very few people remember the premise was that they are the bus driver. Now, knowing how social media is, I expect at least one commenter is going to pipe up and point out that X, Y, and Z aren't numbers...
@@cordeg "Thank you for coming to my TED talk."
A triangle has 3 angles. Calculate the moon’s distance from Earth.
My magazine has 30 pages and only 400 words. Calculate the circumference of the earth within 20 minutes.
I have a book. Prove the the Riemann hypothesis
Was it Raphael, Gabriel and Michael?
We'll have to asked the three angels for the answer and whether they are positioned on each angle respectively..
The answer is 180 km lol
its always "how old is the Captain?" but never "how is the Captain?"
theres no captain
kinda old but gets me every time
The captain is angry from stepping in sheep and goat manure!
but where is the captain
when is the captain
what made him a captain
Seasick .kinda.
My exact thoughts after reading it: “old enough to be a captain”. 🤷♂️😂
🤣🤣🤣I thought of the same thing
The answer is 46 years old. Cause 46 years before the captain's mom got pregnant. What does this have to do with the sheep you ask? Well...nothing really.
@@Dravis1995 Were any of the sheep cousins of the captain on his mom's side? 😉
Old enough to be a captain? Well this captain is an Ocampa, so she became an adult at the age of 3, and reached the rank of captain just before her fifth birthday. And hopes to make admiral but doesn't think she can do it unless she lives to the ripe old age of nine!
Good answer I suppose. I like the other question better. 5 dogs is way more than needed to properly manage a flock of just 125 sheep. Therefore the shepherd must be elderly. He needs all the help he can get and would have to be pretty old and experienced to be able to afford (or raise and train himself) so many skilled sheep dogs from such a limited income as 125 sheep would provide.
As many have pointed out, the main issue is that "this is unsolvable" or other variation of that answer get severely punished by a lot of teachers even if it is the correct answer and not just in primary school, i can personally remember two instances in high school, one of them being in final year on a physics class exam where with the parameters given the problem violated the laws of physics and i got failed that exam for pointing that out, even with the teacher admitting that there was indeed an error in the problem.
Most mandatory education seems hell bent to kill any sense of logic or inquisitiveness in students.
THAT IS HOW THE U S GOVERNMENT HAS SCHOOLED IT'S CITIZENS ACQUIESCENCE FOR "PATRIOTIC CONSCRIPTIONS" ABOVE SENSIBLE SELF HUMAN UVALDE-ED INTERESTS.
Hey I had the same happen! On a physics final exam the question was worded incorrectly which made it impossinle to answer correctly. (This happened quite a lot but only once on a final exam) I answered by first pointing out the error and why it would be impossible, then gave two solutions for whichever way they meant to ask the question.
Huge run on sentence.
nobody said the captain was *legally* driving the boat
Exactly!
so the answer is
depends who read this question
He. Is. A. CAPTAIN
He. Does. Not. EXIST.
There wasnt anythng legal aboht the question itself..could be anythg
Assume the captain's age is 69 year's old.
Therefore his age is 69 . Hence, proved.
NXPY
Nice.
Assume the captain is not 69.
We have reached a contradiction, the captain is 69.
QED.
Nice.
Nice
You must be a quantum physicist.
My daughter was set an on- line exam (timed), when applying for an accountants job. She was working through the questions well but running out of time to complete the full set and was beginning to panic. Then she stopped finished the final question she could answer in the time and noted at the end " I have not completed the final questions as they would have been guesses and you do not hire an accountant to make guesses" . She got the job.
Wow. Congrats to her. She was right though!
Did you steal this from LinkedIn?
@Jared-e The original post was 1 year ago vs your comment on it 3 days ago. So, without enough info, it could be either way. It was just as likely the linkedn one was copied from here.
Yeah. You are full of it. She would of been disqualified just off of merit. Only way is her note had no bearing on it and she still scored high enough. Sometimes in test taking you have to focus on what you can answer and not waste excessive time. That's test taking 101.
You sure fulfill the promise of your username @@IhateAlot718
A lot of students are taught that a guessed answer might be wrong but it won’t get your points reduced, but it MIGHT be right and get points. So atleast I was taught to just write SOMETHING even if I didn’t know the answers, just because it might be correct. I think that’s also a reason why this is happening. I would think that the results would be quite different if it wasn’t experimented on students that need results but just as a survey where it doesn’t matter. A lot more people would just laugh it off.
*Captains age is 35 killometers* .
I’m dead lol😂😂😂😂
35 km 😊😂😁
Kilometers☺️🌝😁😃😁😁lolll gonead
It's actually 35 kilometers and 4 ampere
....and his eyes are blue
Bill is an engineer. He has been married for 20 years and has 2 daughters. He is professionally successful and his family love him. Find the age of the guy Bill's neighbour met on his trip to Italy.
22, based on how many likes were given on a random UA-cam comment at the time this question was answered. In Italy.
@@AdrianMark +1
@@AdrianMark Haha
I’m French and I was asked this question in class when I was a kid for the same reason exposed in this video: critical thinking. Oddly enough, I didn’t question the solvability of the problem because it was asked by my teacher at the time. I’m 39 today so that was more than 30 years ago
@@AdrianMark 76 now
My first thought was exactly like that one guy, I immediately thought, _"there must be a license restriction to having a boat, having a sheep, and tending goats, AND transporting livestock, etc."_
I didn't even know "There is not enough information" could be an answer in these math puzzles. When presented with such question, I will guesstimate based on available variables.
"Old enough" was my 1st answer
How is this not top comment?!
@@rahulsharma-cu7wp :(
Yeah, I think that's safe but also true answer 😄
@@rahulsharma-cu7wp this comment is top. It's the 4th comment (in my phone)
I like this answer.
Watching this felt like a Zoom meeting that could have been an email
Lol agreed.
Mmmhm
I swear to god if he mentions that this questions origins was actually france one more time....
Watching this felt like a Zoom meeting that could have been an e-mail that could have been an sms
@@x8sNaKe8x oh I wondered where this question originated from !? :D
As long as this question is framed as a math question people will try to get a mathematical answer. The real question should be how to get people to change their frame of reference and what should be the basis of their doing so
As an elementary math teacher problems like this are more common than you think. They are usually a lot more subtle and are actually solvable but include extraneous information to test for understanding. Can the child actually sort through the info and determine what is actually needed? Or are they just adding up all the numbers because they don't really comprehend the problem?
A Mother is 21 years older than her child. In 6 years she's 5 times as old as her child. Where is the father?
The father is with the mother, having sex. This is the point of conception. The child is yet to be born - and will be born in 9 months ie 3/4 of a year. In other words, the child could be described as -3/4 year old, and the mother is 20 and 1/4.
In 6 years time she will be 26 1/4 and the child 5 1/4.
@@ASD128London you have done it!
@@rudiralla9630 so has the father!
Father went to buy milk, never came back
How old is the captain?
Me: *x years old*
Me too!! 😅😂
correct.
the best advise - if you don't know a value,just call it X
😁😁
Why does math use x bcause x is from syin(ش)arab
From arab bcause algebra is from aljabr in arab
The minimum age to drive a boat in China is 20. The minimum age required of sailing a boat that weighs more than 5 tons is an extra 3, so the captain is atleast 23.
But your cousin Timmy is doing all of this at the age of 3
Nothing in the question says the captain is Chinese or even in China.
You forgot about the 5 years qualification required y'know... So it's 23+5 =28
@@rithvikmuthyalapati9754 but I shot him with a shotgun
@dsm3759703 what else would they know there? Any ways it's in China so they are going to assume it uses Chinese laws.
Why were the researches so surprised that elementary school students would blindly add two numbers together in a math class? Makes perfect sense to me.
He's one day older today than he was yesterday
We have a genius right here
Big brain 🧠
Omg 😁
Aha. Fantastic.
That's common sense. And it's rare to see someone who actually uses common sense
Easy.
The captain is 42 years old.
How do I know?
He's my cousin.
😂 LOL
Seriously😯 😂😂
ask him, simply as that
Since question is itself 40 years old was he 2 years old when published,?
LOL
I think that the wording that the ship "had" makes a difference because it implies that the ship no longer exists. So the captain is unfortunately dead
It is the subjunctive for a counterfactual, not the past tense.
I vaguely remember similar questions in elementary school where they would try to teach you how to ignore irrelevant information. Things like, being given numbers of fruits and vegetables and only counting the fruits, or a list of prices and adding only certain ones. Then there's the "Read all questions carefully before starting the test" where the last question is something like, "Do only the first two problems".
It’s because when we are given a question schools teach “there’s always an answer”.
This is the result.
Well in this case the answer is: "how the f would I know, dear teacher?"
sometimes the answer is "you didn't provide enough information" -- Confounding units is literally the reason why so many people believed the nonsense that Bloomberg spent a million per person on his campaign.
Exactly. And there's not always an answer in maths, although this largely only applies to the University-level theoretical math modelling. If you look at a lot of problems at that level, you'll find plenty of them have "...Or is the question ill-formed?" stapled onto the end. The ability to determine that a question might be unsolvable is an important skill. Of course this usually comes up when talking about Euler Field Manifold Hypergroups and Sondheim calculus, but the question in the video is a perfectly adequate scale model.
@@germanher7528 The first time a student encounters a question with this answer, after 13+ years of cooked data with answers, there is resentment.
I was taught that there's always an answer but the answer can be that there is no solution
The answer: the Captains age is the current date minus his date of birth.
(snicker) what seconds does the clock say? Add 20.
But do we need the chineese calendar, western calendar, the original Roman calendar, Mayan calendar? Which dates should we use? 0_o'
@@tomvos5594 it wouldn't matter just make sure both dates are referenced against the same calendar.
@@AdrianMark It would, bc the mayan and the roman calendar had different ways of counting. The old roman calendar was a lunar calendar, which falls 10 to 11 days shorter compared to a modern year, and had to be adjusted. The mayan calendar had a switch between a 365 days year, and a 260 days year. The (old) chineese calendar and (old) western calendar look very similar to the modern Georgian calendar, but still had bigger inconsistencies than our modern (Georgian) calendar. If we had the Julian Calendar, we'd be 13 days ahead of today's date.
So, would it matter? Yes, very much even
@@tomvos5594 for normal accuracy, I always use the current star date.
One of my teachers gave us a question similar to this once.
"You're driving a bus. At the very first stop, seven people get on. At the next stop, three more get on and one gets off. At the third stop, six get on and five get off, and at the fourth stop, two people get on and four people get off. How old is the bus driver?"
Of course in this question, the answer is the age of the person answering the question, since it is phrased as "YOU are driving a bus."
I don't remember "unsolvable" being the answer to a single homework/test question in years of math class. I think a kind of rote teaching is responsible for the outcome of this experiment, as it places students in a kind of closed thinking box.
When I was presented with this very question many years ago, I anwered: "Well, 43 years old..." Then they asked: "How do you know that?" I anwered: He's my uncle...
Lol
Lol
Lol
Lol
Lol
Teacher: How old is the captain?
Me: Yes.
DEAD!!!!
😂😂😂😂
😂
I cant get what does the yes mean
When some one ask a question
@@artirani7405 yes is a joke ☺
The 3 Stooges made this a comedy bit back in the late 30's. Larry: A train going from Chicago to Cincinnati at 90 MPH. What's the engineers name? Moe: I don't know? Larry: Pat McCarthy. Moe: How did you know that? Larry: I asked him...........
"l'age du capitaine" is commonly used in French to refer to something unsolvable^^
We Trekkies say "Kobayashi Maru"
2+2=4. Calculate how many stars are in the milky way.
4 stars obviously
@@andrerodrigues2877 4 seems too little, try 2x2x4
That's easy! Let x be a number
Therefore, The no. of stars in the milky way = 4*x
Just kidding lol😂
Zero. It was not specified, which milky way. So I assume that the milky way is the road from the dairy to my house. Not a single star on it.
@@sameerthakur720 I was actually thinking of the milkyway snack lol
You have 10 apples. You give 10 to your friend. What do you have left?
Answer: a friend.
My friend is a doctor. You just scared him away.
10 apple and a dead friend. Cuz he force me to give my apples. The audacity of that guy.
What if said friend hates apples tho??
And then you just burden him with all of these apples
Then where is the Apple then if you have your friend,
There are certain factors in your equation to be be considered. Were the apples good or rotten? Were there worms in the apples?
But my answer is "no apples and no friend and you are now hungry".
This problem was actually part of my introduction to unsolvable problems. We were told in 1st grade, during math, that not all problems contained enough information to be solved. We were given a few problems, and we were told to write “no answer” for the unsolvable ones. This problem was, as far as I can remember, the third unsolvable one.
He is old enough to be adult and thinking about future food, and also old enough to be an educated experienced captain.
To be fair, if a question is included in the exam, it is perfectly normal to assume that it is *meant* to be solved. It is always better to guess an answer than to leave it blank.
Ye always better, the problem is doubting that the question wasn’t a mistake. Thats one of conclusions people can get, and in the end it can lead to:-
10 sheep and 30 worm = 40 leaves
I guess i'll leave it blank
Which brings us to Covid prediction "modelling".........
@Where's the hen? yes but these math students have likely never had an exam question that didn’t have a definitive answer. I’m sure 90% plus came to the conclusion that the question was illogical, but weighed that against the chance that they were asked a illogical question, based on their past exam history. Since they never had a math question asked that didn’t have a definitive answer, they decided to work with what they had, most likely not even knowing if there’s an option to write “not enough info” as the answer. Most would assume that writing this as the answer would be equivalent to a wrong answer and so the overwhelming majority decide to at least perform “math”, and therefore use the numbers given in the question. I would have come to this hypothesis for sure if I had been part of the team responsible for this “experiment”. My hypothesis would have been different if the question was asked to older students. If they were aiming to perform a psychological study based on this idea, I am surprised they didn’t manipulate age of student as a independent variable to better understand the results. I believe their results would be much more accurate this way, and would have been a much better measure of whatever they were trying to test. I do not know the full history of this, and so maybe this wasn’t an actual experiment, but more of a “let’s see what happens if we do this”. Either way, I feel it could have been performed more effectively.
For the past 5 years or so, in multiple choice type exams, "not enough information" is also offered as one of the responses.
What teacher taught: 1+1=2
Homework: 4x7
Exam: *HOW BIG IS DA SUN*
15 grams
@@milkman9412 No it's actually 18km
@@yanxi8279 What? It's actually the color Red
Whuut ? I thought the answer was I am eating pizza.
Accurate😂
To me the real problem for trying to ‘answer’ the problem is the test environment. I’d have manipulated the numbers too, at any stage of my education, simply because i am making a test and i want to maximise my score. Even i know when im writing nonsese, maybe i can pick up some points here and there. And then submit my complaint after the results are known. As long the question is posed that way on a test, all my critical thinking will be on the complaint
I think the problem lies in the education system and how we test students. Students expect the teacher to give them solvable test questions. They are afraid to say "I don't know" or "There is not enough information" because they are afraid to get the question wrong. I don't know how to explain this better.
Making a silk purse out of …
The concept that numbers have objective meanings is missing. So teach it, in words!
The concept that words have meanings is also missing. So teach it, again in words!
The fact, that these latter words can have no effect in conveying information is simply lost to proponents of the system.
Deriving the captain''s age is impossible. Teaching certain people certain facts is likewise impossible. The most one can do, is to teach a ritual for faking understanding. The most one can do is probably not the best one can do. Incurable incompetents should not be hired for vital tasks, so it is dangerous to teach them to fake their way into jobs.
When I was a child, there was similar problem that was as follows "Imagine that you are the captian of a ship. The ship is 60m long and there are 30 sheeps and 10 cows (I don't remember the actual numbers but there is no difference). How old is the captian?". A lot have missed the first part, that you are the captain ...
Oh...
Ah, yes.
"Forget the crutial part" question.
Hate.
The difference is that this one actually has a correct answer, while the other one does not. Even though both of them are trick questions.
You're travelling in a bus.
At the first stop, you pick up three Caucasian women aged between 25 and 45, wearing beige frocks.
At the second stop, you pick up an African-American child of 10, an old man with a cane and two sad clowns in full make-up.
At the third stop, one of the Caucasian woman exits, and an Asian woman and her child enter the bus.
What colour are the bus driver's eyes?
@@TheMrMe1 Brown, since it's color of my eyes :P
Calculate the mass of the sun: *finally, a worthy opponent*
what im pretty sure thats not that hard(i dont know how dont ask)
Yes you see, Sun is a Star, Star is the thing you will get when you did something right, so just measure that Star and the answer is there
hahahahah
m = RoV we know both things so actually its not that hard
2×10^30
My math teacher warned us that his test questions were designed to reward the bright and punish the dull. For example, he would give us what appeared to be a complicated algebraic division problem. And it could be solved the tedious way. But if stopped to look at it first, you’d see the numerator and denominator could be factored and like terms be canceled out such that the division became much simpler. I still remember his lesson 55 years later.
captain is 26+10= 36 months old. he's 3 years old and is imagining driving a ship with 36 animals.
Bruh the answer is simple: THERE IS NO CAPTAIN, THERE ARE ONLY SHEEP AND GOATS ON BOARD
Assuming there are only goats , and sherp onboard , one of yhem is the captain. One can not put a definate age to yhe csptain , but it can be limited to the life span of goats , and sheep, providing that they are not killed for food , or other products , approximately 17 years. Naturally some live longer , some have shorter life spans , depending on the breed.
One could state the csptain is as old as a goat , or sheep can live ,
that would be as definitive as one could surmise.
Omg, genius. The question never specified there was a captain on the ship.
I liked you way of thinking but it does ask how old is the captain of the ship. The captain does not need to be on the ship.
Wrong, that answer makes no sense
Edit: or almost none
Saying that a ship has sheeps and goats on board doesn't means that there are only sheeps and goats on board
Many students, especially in elementary school, would never think of the idea that they would be given a problem without a solution. You don’t really learn unsolvable problems until more advanced education
this is what im thinking! when you ask these types of questions in a MATH class the students are gonna try their best to do some MATH, they arent primed to do riddles they're primed to add and subtract or whatever.
somehow as a kid I always thought we will always be given to do math but when my teacher asked us one of these I didn't even bother to try and solve it I subconsciously knew he was testing how we think but couldn't understand the feeling I had back then so I trusted my guts.
Also when the question is unsolvable its usually from a error from the teacher which makes it get canceled and you get a score no matter if you tried to give an answer.
If the question was solvable thru some absurd logic and you put "not solvable" you get a wrong.
Even then, you don't see them often, and normally its part of a set where you are explicitly told not all problems are solvable. I mean as an engineer, in classes you can go from some random knowledge like if a wire has air around it, and get, exactly how bright a light will be on the other end. In a class where you are taught laws on various maritime jobs, and the reproductive rates of animals, then you could likely find a good explanation for the problem shown.
@@elzeeablo6324 except the very foundation of math is logical thinking, what you are describing as math seems to be just computations that any calculator can do
Maybe this is weird and just kinda unique to the school I go to but we have had questions like this in the past in many of our tests. In fact I remember we had a whole 100 minute lesson one time devoted specifically to explaining when to answer with "not enough information provided".
My school has a huge emphasis on "critical thinking" which is basically just getting good at problem solving so ig that might be why, like for example almost all of our tests will have a question at the end that will be mostly unrelated to the topic we were studying and instead will just be a hard to understand question, no difficult math just difficult thinking.
"Quel est l'age du capitaine ?" (How old is the captain?) has been a common math joke in France for much longer than 1979. It can be found in a letter by Flaubert in 1841.
Actually, in French, "Quel est l'âge du capitaine ?" ("How old is the captain?") is a standard joke and a bit of a cliché to denote an absurd problem where the data has no relevance whatsoever to the question.
Not necessarily. Usually, this "question-joke" is "you have a ship. aboard this ship are X sheeps and X goats and X parrots and .... [8 hours later] ... How old is the captain ?"
The thing is : "you have a ship". Therefore it's your age.
Adrien Bellaiche Only if you are the captian of your ship though
Adrien Bellaiche it just said “the ship” not your.
data with no relevance to the question asked? common core in a nutshell :-)
This might just be a thing in Québec, but here the gag is usually "Calculez la masse du Soleil."
"Jhonny is 5 years old. His dad is 29 years old. How many buildings are there in area 51?"
Students: 34
85
@@lycheesack 😂😂😂
I'll give you a correct answer: More than 2.
lol those idiots. It Is obviously 24!/
wrong. 145
If my car has a flat tire, and my neighbor is at work, how many coins are in my pocket?
Watching a series of these videos on math questions is just making me depressed. The problem isn't lack of critical thinking skills or lack of intelligence of the students, it's a failure of the examiners and writers of the questions to clearly define the boundaries. In this case, even the smartest critical thinker is likely to be under the impression that there MUST be a solution, otherwise the question wouldn't be in the exam. They need to be informed that 'not enough information' is an option, and if they are, they'll provide the correct answer without any issues. In other cases it boils down to the writers failing to clearly define the words they use in the question, or failing to clearly indicate the necessary boundaries of the student's thinking. Are they supposed to think outside the box, or are they simply being asked a question on e.g. logic and supposed to ignore human motivations despite the often anthropomorphised style of the question?
If roses are red and a kingdom is lead by a king, then why did youtube recommend me this at 2 in the morning?
Its midnight here... liked ur cmt now m gonna sleep
Better question is why are you on your computer at 2 in the morning?
@@ashotdjrbashian9606 who said i'm on my computer? 😏
@@peraltagabriellouisb.7936 even better question. Why are you using electronics and scrolling UA-cam at 2 in the morning?
I appreciate the fact that it rhymes.
Researchers: Alice has 10 sheep, bob has 14 bears. How old is the sun?
Students: 10 + 14 = 24
Researchers: *angry scribbling*
The sun is eternal, the end is nigh
"Younger than your mom"
This is not a Math question. Ignore the first clause of the question and focus on the second. It tells us that the Captain is called Mr/Ms HOW OLD. It is a brain twister quiz.
no no no you didn't get it. its 14 (bears) -10 (sheep)= 4.
then, bob has 3 letters in his name and alice has 5. 3+5= 8, and since there is two of them you divide it 8/2 = 4. after that, you add 1 sun to that result and get 5.
the key word of the question is BEARS so, the answer is the sun is 4.5 B(illon)yEARS old.
and if you are wondering what happened to the sheep, half of them are used for wool. because we are aproaching the next ice age (the key for that being the kids AGE) and that the other half got eaten by the bears, sadly, which is ICE COLD (alice is still, after 4.5 billion years, mad at bob for that).
you dummies.
@@tonyc4035 That's exactly what I got out of the question. The Captain's name is How Old. His age is irrelevant as, if he is the captain, it stands to reason he has the proper paperwork to prove his position and therefore the experience to hold that position.
There was a problem from a math book in sixth grade. There was a "car" of a given length and width (assumed perfectly rectangular) and a parking lot of a given area. You were supposed to estimate how many cars would fit into the parking lot. The way the question was phrased, it was not a problem in topology but simple math of calculating the area of the car and dividing it into the area of the parking lot. If you did it precisely, it wound up with a number like 11.75. Which I then rounded down to 11 because you had to "fit" the cars into the parking lot. The book said 12. The teacher (and the author of the math book) could not understand why you had to round down, not to the nearest number. This same teacher didn't know the difference between the circumference of a circle and the area. Eventually, after I forcefully challenged her a couple of times in front of the other students, they had to bring in another teacher to teach math. She was unfit to teach sixth grade, as she did not have a knowledge of sixth grade math. Horrible teacher in many other respects as well.
it is a grey area how much of a word based math problem is supposed to be just arithmetic and how much is real world. In the real world you can't park cars on all the land in a parking lot, you need ~50% of the land for driving lanes, so that the cars can enter and leave in any order. But most math teachers aren't expecting that level of realism.
My brain at 3 am: What is the meaning of life?
Me (from today onwards): There is not enough information
If you are reading this comment before watching the video, congrats you're saving 7 minutes of your life.
The answer is "insufficient data"
Friedrich I wish your comment was on top
sanjeev yadav aye, same here.
I knew it
The answer to the math problem is, "Not enough information."
The point of the video is, "A large number of students tried to solve an unsolvable problem rather than simply saying that there wasn't enough information. That, coupled with the fact that the media covered the absurdity of the question, shows that the entire purpose of asking the question in the first place was missed. The purpose of the question was simply to try and get students to thinking logically and clearly. Which most didn't do."
The 7 minutes wasn't about solving the math equation. It was about the problem with society that the equation revealed.
Friedrich u just save my life thanks :)
You deserve the Nobel prize for being able to drag this video out. 1 minute would have been enough.
Thought the same. He was repeating the same things over & over.
Such a waste of time lol (8min, including comment)
there's not a category of Nobel Price for a UA-cam video... lol
Well said! Well said! Well said! Well said! Well said! Sorry, sometimes I get carried away...
Agreed, I actually fast forwarded to the end, and even then he was repeating what he said at the beginning.
There is a similar ‘problem’ that I’ve known for almost forty years. It goes like this:
Imagine you are an airline pilot. You take off from city A with 50 passengers on board. You land in city B. 18 passengers get off, and 25 get on. You fly to city C, where….
The point is to string a number of cities with different numbers of passengers getting off and on the plane, to confuse the listener until you ask them “what is the pilot’s age?”
Of course, the age of the pilot is always the age of the person trying to figure it out.
It’s a good exercise in paying attention to what’s important when solving problems.
"This problem has been asked almost 40 years ago..."
This line in the narration stumped me. English is my second language, and one of the hard and fast rules you learn when studying elementary English is that simple past tense (not present perfect) is always used for verb action that took part in the past, especially when it has the unmistakable in-the-past marker "ago".
"We normally use ago with the past simple. We don't use it with the present perfect: I received his letter four days ago. Not: I have received his letter four days ago." (Cambridge Dictionary)
This reminds me of a physics problem I had in high school. It was something about accidentally throwing keys at a speed of 20 meters per second and figuring out the distance traveled. While my classmates were figuring out the kinematics, I was stuck on figuring out how a 20 m/s throw was an “accident.”
*Congratulations!* you have critical thinking skills
I remember our class got "Tom Backhouse is thrown out of an aeroplane for not doing his homework again, calculate the distance he travels before striking the ground" because our physics teacher had a sense of humour.
I remember a physics multiple choice question that involved the "Power = Work / Time" formula.. it was a Dragonball Z question.. can't remember the entire problem, but the question was "what is Goku's power level?"
The answer was "over 9,000"
I still remember how I laughed like a maniac after figuring out the answer to that question.. my physics teacher was a memelord back then.
By the way, the keys traveled only 2 meters, because the wretch throwed them at the wall of his room (seriously damaging it).
andsalomoni I’m pretty sure the problem said the keys were thrown off of a cliff, probably the Grand Canyon. I left that detail out because the focus was on how half the speed of a Major League fastball could qualify as an accident.
From the students' point of view, in most cases, you get the score anyway if it is unsolvable. This is because unsolvable questions are mostly the results of the teacher's errors and thus the students are not the ones to blame.
However, there are times when the questions are actually solvable. In these cases, you are guaranteed to lose the score if you leave a blank or write "this is unsolvable". On the other hand, by randomly guessing some nonsense answers, there is a chance to get partial scores.
So, these are the choice for the students:
(a) Write nothing or write "this is unsolvable" to only get the scores when it is indeed unsolvable.
(b) Write random bullsh*t to get all the scores when it is unsolvable and potential partial scores when it is not.
The fact that most students picked (b) is actually proof that they can do critical thinking.
THIS. Whenever you are taking a test in early life it's on a subset of a subject. A nonsense question means either an error, or that the test has decided to do something it shouldn't, namely test you on something outside of the subject. Your options are using context to try and work out the intended question and possibly gaining partial marks if the mistake holds up even further (I've seen this and it's inverse, correctly pointing out the flaw in the question and... getting 0). Or gamble on the question being a surprise test outside the subject matter being tested, and that what they /want/ to see is "Not enough information" and not some kind of mad guess using numbers to test your 'creativity'.
...basically you can't derive critical thinking or it's lack from how someone of that age approaches this problem, it's instead if/how they consider the meta problem of "Is this the one test in my life thats trying to mess with me".
I don't blame the students, but this shows more that the current state of math education does not properly teach critical thinking.
In college I had an engineering dynamics exam where one of the questions was unsolvable. After finishing the rest of the test I went up to the instructor to turn it in and informed him of the issue, but instead of taking me seriously he just said, "well, do your best"... there was nothing to do so I handed in the test and left. Everyone else in the class was still there until the very end trying to solve it and when I talked to them afterwards they were all so confused and ended up going in all kinds of nonsensical directions. When we got our tests back the teacher let us all know he made a big mistake and so everyone was getting full credit for their answers -everyone except me! I'm still mad about that over 30 years later, I was the only one to actually understand the problem and the only one not to get any credit at all for it.
@@sharonalley6292 that is most definitely unfair! But the other way to look at it is that you proved to yourself that you are a true critical thinker. It doesn't matter what the lecturer or other students (or even the world) thinks. There is one other more subtle benefit you got from such an unfair outcome- it makes you mentally tough. That's got to be a more valuable lesson. 🙏
Game theory
when I wrote my report in school on lord of the flies, my ending was based on the fact that I thought the ending was open ended and not final. my teacher was disappointed in my report. some years later it turns out my book was missing the page. so I was right but no one knew that and assumed I had missed the point enitely. my lesson taught me to never trust mainstream assumption lol
This is the real equivalent of "Timmy is late 6 mins too school, calculate the mass of the sun
The captain is 62 years old.
There are 26 sheep, two of them are the parents. It takes one year to make one baby sheep. It took 24 years to make the 24 baby sheep.
Likewise, 2 of the 10 goats are the parents, and it took 8 years to make the 8 baby goats.
In ancient France, the miminum age to be a captain (for a ship that holds animals with four legs) is 30. Due to limited resources aboard a ship, French maritime law forbids breeding of more than one animal per year, i.e., only one baby goat or one baby sheep can be produced in one year.
Assuming the captain boarded the ship at the minimum age of 30, and started with only the two pairs of animals, 30 plus 24 plus 8 equals 62.
And I base all the above information on absolutely nothing. But thank you for reading.
does this count on r/hedidthemath ?
But this is the kind of thinking that may be possible, given the context.
Even lacking this, one could examine statistics of ships and animals on them, and perhaps find a small age range of the captains.
But isn’t 24 years of age old for a sheep? Even if the parents are alive at that age, would they still be reproducing?
What if the baby sheeps made more babies in the time period of 24 years. Heck even average life expectancy of sheep is 10-12 years.
Repent to Jesus Christ
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
Psalms 19:1 NIV
Mu
students are used to seeing sloppy questions that have been copied and pasted, often with spelling and grammar mistakes in them. They are also used to seeing questions graded against faulty grading keys. The student is then taught to second guess the test question, and form a guess as to what was the tester really trying to ask.
A blank response is 0 points. It's a broken question, but any response is going to improve the odds.
This again is not about the students but about the teachers. If a teacher asks, students have learned there must be a solution. Not a math class problem.
@@marksholcomb I don’t agree. An important facet in math classes involves garnering relevant information from a word problem to solve it, as one might need to do in a real-world context. Recognizing whether or not there is enough information to solve it is an important skill in approaching such a problem.
@@tineye5100 but students are mostly taught that's there's always an answer, even if you can't see the way to solve it. If not doing the question is worth 0 then so is saying that the question has no answer, leaving a question untried is more likely to lead to no points
That's accurate! That has really been a problem. Sometimes it's due to teachers copying questions and changing up the numbers without considering whether the solution could be obtained using methods taught, or whether it would not result in imaginary number or undefined solution. I really wrote things like "The question is not solvable because of lack of information. But if you insist, in case -2 was a and not c, take x= -1 as the answer." on the answer sheet
I miss going to school as a little kid. When asked: What do you get when you rub your hands together? I learned that 'dirt' wasn't the correct one.
I have many times pointed out mistakes in exams like this and most of the times the reply was something beteen "you are technically right but we were looking for a different answer" and "if you had studied you would know the answer"... Professors and especially teachers are very reluctant to admit mistakes to students, and especially in front of other students.
The main reason kids will try to answer an unanswerable question on a test is that its a test and school generally teaches obediences rather than questioning.
Try telling a 5th grade teacher an assignment is using outdated information and see what happens.
You know schools still have kids perform the tongue taste experiment even though it has been proven that there is not an area of the tongue that can only experience a specific taste.
Kids will give the answer they think the teacher or the curriculum wants, to get the grade. Its all about the grade.
You can question things AFTER you get the grade.
corthew omg yasss.
True.
I remember one day, my teacher asked us to solve "3 - 5 = ?".
My answer: -2.
Teacher: WRONG! Me: Why?
Teacher: we haven't seen negative numbers yet, it's part of next year's curriculum...
o_O
Sad but true
Pierre C. This happened to me once our teacher taught us that 10*0.5 = 5 (or something like that ) and so i asked if 10/0.5 = 20 and she just told it was wrong without explaining xD
P.S. or she taught us 10/0.5=20 and I asked her if 10*0.5 ÷ 5
I totally agree
The lesson in this ?
I will sit through seven minutes of a guy repeating himself before he finally gets to the point that some people will apply unconnected information just to get an answer to a complicated question… just like Qanon.
I never thought I was this patient
Peopel should not waste time. This should be the top comment
Or msnbc
I quite liked learning about the history
That's not really the presenter's fault. It is the Indianness in him on full display. We do tend to be wordy, long-winded, and experts at run-on sentences without use of punctuation, or commas for that matter which to most individuals is pretty evident, except, for some unfathomable reason we never seem to pay attention to this, rather, minor annoyance and when we do, we almost always brush it away under the assumption that we are really making a lot of sense, when we aren't.
Ah! Well...
Lmao by the time he said 'french researchers' twice i 2x the video speed
I liked the bit about figuring out the minimum age of the captain based on the weight of the boat. I was hoping someone had figured out some way to nail it down even more, perhaps in a certain jurisdiction.
Ok, now that you have calculated the captain’s age, calculate mine. That’s the real mathematical challenge.
If we asume you are x years old with x beeing your age than your age is x years
The age of the captain is green.
A fish.
Electricity.
Attack helicopter
During the night, it is much colder than inside. Because the train drives faster than downhill.
Baguettes are gaseous in pluto because 7 8 9.
I've heard of trick questions that read "You are the captain of a cargo ship. The ships has 10 tons of wheat, 25 tons of corn, 30 tons of sugar, and 80 tons of coal. How old is the captain?" If you paid attention, you'd reply with your age, since the question began with you as the captain.
Omg. You opened a new universe for me. Not jk seriously. thank you
That's hilarious.
That came on TV in some show didn't it...was quite fun to watch it in the mornings.
I'm Indian this type of questions is asked among middle school students to fun like....
If you are the driver of a bus you stopped bus in a A station, from there 5 passengers joined with you and next you stopped in B station 3 people's gone from bus and 7 people joined .what is the age of driver?
i turn 53 in a couple of months. i know a similar riddle in Russian ending with "when did grandma of the door keeper die?" since my early childhood (from my elder brothers). The answer was "What do I need you fridge, if I don't smoke?"
I was NEVER told that "insufficient data" was ever permissable. I was told that if something didn't make sense, it was a personal failing that meant I was a bad person.
Exactly... in math class there is no room for “critical thinking”. What we’re given is numbers, and we’re supposed to make direct use of them. That’s just how we’ve been taught. To throw a curveball like this on an exam is just unfair. Yeah yeah life isn’t fair whatever
This should be something ask in an interview in some public servant entrance or as general knowledge not Maths.
Clam Chowder Delectable well they always do that to me when I was studying in a local school in Asia, now im in an international school and the math here is pretty easy
Clam Chowder Delectable well in most public school maths yes this is true. As a college mathematics major (only a freshman, so not too far removed) calculus, when taught on a proof basis, requires intense critical thinking, and actually gives students a TRUE understanding of logic and mathematics
White Westly That was my point: It is acceptable, but I was told the opposite. I had been misinformed.
The problem is that the students were worried about being labelled as incapable of lateral thinking, so they manipulated the numbers.
Now this is some lateral thinking
Sounds about right. Also considering how people talk about math when they don't like, people come up with any number just to have an answer whatever it is, even if it doesn't make a lick of sense.
the problem of such "problems" is that it is proposed to guess what the author came up with, there is neither creativity nor mathematics...
in addition, earlier children were probably punished for doubting the authority of the teacher or the correctness of the problem. school does not teach critical thinking, but wean from it
After experiencing this question students proceed to answer "there isn't enough information" during most of their calculus tests
I remember in elementary school getting a lot of questions that had too little information unless you just kinda arbitarily extracted the numbers from them. Usually it was probably just whoever wrote it being lazy when trying to make a math problem into a sentence. I remember getting scolded for once answering that there were too many unacounted for variables and being told to just add the numbers togheter and not be a smartass.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if those students knew fully well that the question made no sense... and then just tried added the numbers togheter anyways and hoped they wsy they did it was what the question writer had intended the question to be, because that's what they had been trained to do.
you are smarter than that "teacher" could ever hope to be. hope you are doing well
"George had 5 school buses, calculate how long it takes the earth to explode."
Hahaha
Correct answer: rounded to the nearest possibilities is that earth cannot explode because 5 buses isn't enough LOL and even if the 5 buses are filled with dynamite/tnt it's still not enough because THERE IS NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION HAAHAHHAAH learnt that from this video
Bruhify invasion is getting bigger
damn thats a lot of bus
4-5 billion years
Before watching the video: The ship contains 26 sheep and 10 goats, there is no captain specified as being on the ship.
Fair point.
The captain must be one of the sheep or goats. Goats live up to 18 years and sheep up to 12, so the captain must be under 18 years old.
It uses the definite article for the second usage of "ship" which implies that here it is referring to the same ship with the beasts on board.
@@blartversenwaldiii And hence the captain is illegally Driving the boat.
I also noticed that the question says the "ship had", in the past tense. It is also possible the ship is totally empty at the point in time which serves as the origin of the question.
Why am I not surprised that a bunch of article writers don’t know what they’re talking about
I doubt the children thought there was a real answer to those problems. You don’t have to be an adult to realize the question doesn’t make sense.
What’s so wrong with them using creative reasoning after reading a nonsense question?
"If your only tool is a hammer every problem starts looking like a nail."
Paul Watzlawick
Imagine having a hammer in your hand and your mother complains that she is having a headache.
What is the meaning of that
but if you are a hammer the only problem you have is nails
So I should kill my teachers?
How is your name JackhammerJesus?
Are you like... reall into hammers?😅
Another interesting questions is: How do you turn a 1 minute of content into a video that's 7 minutes & 23 seconds long?
Take this to the top please. Just so others don't waste 7 minutes of their life, the answer he gives is NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION. There isn't more of an explanation, it's just to check how the students think
Idk why don’t you ask this guy
By telling "40 years ago" "not enough information" over and over
And get millions of views?
I know Bill, terrible isn't it. Disappointing sooo many people :(
It's an important lesson, but it should be noted that sometimes it seems like a problem does not have sufficient information but it's still solvable.
Still better than: "Alvin broke his shoelace. He needs to replace it with one that's exactly the same length. How long should his new shoelace be?"
Plot twist: The goat was captain.
Edit:- Thx for 1k likes
No, I, The Sheep is the captain.
Underrated comment
the goats were his kids!
THE GOAT WAS A LIE! A LIE!
no the captain is the goat
If you ask students a question, they are supposed to give an answer. Teachers often say: any answer is better than no answer at all. So manipulating the numbers is not better maths, but is better strategy then writing down: "I don't know."
And I know that "there is not enough information" is a valid answer, but that is never right on any test, except this one.
there's a difference between saying "i don't know" and "there is not enough information". when you say "not enough information" you're actually giving an answer
Zygo Petalum I know, but it is the same in the eyes of many students.
"Any answer is better than no answer" just seems wrong in general. It's also the "logic" behind superstitions, like oh I can't explain why this bad thing happened so let me blame it on this totally irrelevant thing that was nearby or some unknowable uncontrollable power.
letao12 You at least have a very very very tiny chance you get it right by accident. Good for tests, not for real life.
"Good for tests, not for real life" is precisely what I feel is wrong. Training students to pass an obviously nonsense answer for an attempt (and sometimes rewarding them for it!) feels counterproductive to real education.
We should use reverse psychology on this question, any normal child would think that the teacher has given the question on purpose so that the child answers it as absurd and he or she would go wrong, and they start manipulating with the numbers given, thinking that there is a hint given through those numbers. But, an intelligent child would think that the teacher's intention is just to confuse and has asked the question to see the common sense, and he or she would answer it to be absurd question, which is absolutely correct.
I made this argument on a few occasions in grade school and was promptly scolded for questioning the teacher.
Oh, but you forgot to tell that this was actually a French research question from "NEARLY 40 YEARS AGO!"
viraj gupta that is the brand new information
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@@stefantrandafir1099 erau sarcastici..
Scrolled looking for this! Lol
Phoebeeeee
The captain is 59 years old.
A ship small enough to be filled with that few animals is the kind of job a mariner about to retire would take. The retirement age in China is 60, so our mariner is a year before retirement.
Best answer
Your assumption is flawed in that it assumes there are only sheeps and goats on board. The question does not specify that those are the only kinds of animals on board. There could be, say 10 elephants which are not mentioned.
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No, you don't get to use real world information or any information at all outside of what's given in the problem. That's what a given is for. Solve it using those information. 💁 People really don't understand math problems or why there are givens in the first place.🤦🤦🤦
It's a hypothethical question for pete's sake. Might as well look for that captain in the real world and know "his" real age if you think you can use real world information. 😆
Nope, remember he said this question was made by French researchers 40 years earlier? And either way we can’t assume which country the mariner is from or whether they are old- they could just be beginning their business, fallen on hard times, etc.
Looking at the question from the thumbnail, I immediately thought there is no logical way to solve this. Yet I was curious on the video lol
This question is exactly like those memes where the test question is: "If someone did 4 laps of a racing track, what is the mass of the sun?"