On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 4:33 AM, Larry Martell <larry.mart...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:38 PM, ROGER GRAYDON CHRISTMAN <d...@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 -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list