Even Older Man Yells at Whippersnappers

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 4:33 AM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:38 PM, ROGER GRAYDON CHRISTMAN <dvl at psu.edu> wrote:
>>  I recall giving a quiz to my college students sometime back around
>> the late nineties which had a little bit of arithmetic involved in the answer.
>> It's been too long ago to still have the exact details, but I remember
>> a couple solutions that would be of the form:
>>
>> 5 + 10 + 1*2
>>
>> And then the student would write he was unable to actually
>> compute that without a calculator.   And yes, I deliberately
>> designed the questions to have such easy numbers to work with.
>
> It was my birthday the other day. People at worked asked how old I
> was. I replied:
>
> ((3**2)+math.sqrt(400))*2
>
> Quite a few people somehow came up with 47. And these are technical people.

*headscratch* Multiple people got 47? I'm struggling to figure that
out. If they interpret the first part as multiplication (3*2 => 6),
that would get 26*2 => 52; if they don't understand the square
rooting, they'd probably just give up; if they ignore the parentheses,
that could give 9 + 20*2 => 49; but I can't come up with 47.

ChrisA