KINGSTON, RI—Social scientists at the University of Rhode Island (URI) have revealed a disturbing finding about the average American's mathematical reasoning ability: namely, that 4 out of 3 adults do not understand how ratios work. That is reportedly a majority of the population, according to math and numbers, etc.
Indeed, a whole bunch of people in the U.S., it seems, do not comprehend the simple concept of there being, like proportions and numerators or whatever. And this is a problem, it seems, because of a thing that has something to do with quantities. Like, large "quantities" of adults in the U.S. should really know things with numbers that they don't.
To figure out this problem, the researchers at URI asked a whole lot of people, like even more than 30 it sounds safe to say, to do some math-style problems that involved things like counting, fractions, decimals probably, and even times stuff. They were surprised to find that there was an amount of people who did not know what they wanted that amount of people to know, and it was a quantity of people.
The researchers put it this way: "Whereas the majority of participants could comprehend concepts like multiplication and even exponents with relative ease, approximately 77% of participants struggled with basic concepts of fractions and ratios."
So yeah. Like, that's what's going on in their research. That seems like it's not great news for algebra and everything.
The team made recommendations to improve basic learning of these math things, like encouraging students to do story problems about half of the week. But that already sounds like a big problem because most weeks have like 7 days, and 7 doesn't split in half very easy.
Another big issue these researchers are facing is that most reasonable adults think that math has no place in the modern world, and is just for nerds. They probably have no comment on that.
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