On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 2:41 PM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
They could not explain it either. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list