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" ;-)
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...
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.'
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
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.
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.
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
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 :)
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".
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...
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.
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.
@@QbutNotTheQrun on sentences are extremely fascinating, as they often times represent a person's train of thought, where one thought leads to another thought, and another one, without any tangents that distract them, the esscense of which is perfectly encapsulated in these, long, long sentences that seem to go on with no end, and to which I must pose a question; have there been any studies about how people manage to write run-on sentences, and if there is any correlation between the average length of one, and how advanced the writer may be in such a topic?
This is definitely a big problem. I have encountered it as well. In the context of school, you are nearly always given questions that have solutions. If you do not find a solution, the majority of the time it is because you as the student have done something wrong. It gets even worse with multiple-choice problems, specifically in the context of ACT/SAT/ITBS and similar standardized tests because you will be given a choice between multiple apparently correct answers and you must chose the one that is more correct than the others. In the case where you have an option of "D) None of the above," that will rarely be the correct choice and is only a good choice if you can eliminate all the other possible answers from the list. Basically the dynamics of how schooling is taught will train an individual to assume that each question will have the information necessary to solve it. If it appears that there is not enough information, it MUST be because the student is missing some critical element of the question. Therefore there MUST be some way that the information contained in the question fits together in order to arrive at an answer. I actually ran into this issue in college. I did not go through the traditional public school system as a child, and thus was unaware of this particular bias in education. Imagine my surprise when I got a failing grade on an English writing assignment -- not because of poor punctuation, spelling, or grammar, but because I pointed out that there was a contradiction in the lecture we were using as the basis of the assignment. I was informed by my scholastic advisor that if a professor is looking for answer "A" and I know that answer "A" is wrong, I must still give answer "A" in order to complete the assignment. After giving answer "A," it is acceptable to add "however it is my opinion that answer "B" may also be correct in some cases" though you may still lose some points depending on the professor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It’s scary how many people don’t read the questions. An elementary teacher taught me a process for solving these that has stuck to me till date: (C)ircle the numbers (U)nderline the question (B)ox important words [like units] (E)valuate importance [or (E)liminate unnecessary information] (S)olve
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".
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. 🙏
@@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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I also think there is an expectation, especially at the age that was being tested here, that if you are in a math class, you are there to solve math, not solve riddles, and so people did the most logical math calculation that the problem presented them, even if it didn't really make sense. They probably expected to be told how it actually made sense later. Maybe that's the same thing as you're saying, but most kids aren't going to evaluate math problems they are presented to see whether they are solvable or not. Most things they get asked in class they are going to (probably rightly) assume are solveable.
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.
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
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".
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 ...
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.”
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.
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.
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...........
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
@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.
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
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...
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
"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.
"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.
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
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.
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?
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."
Problem with that is that the student is unlikely to be old enough to actually be a bus driver. So part of the hypothetical situation of them driving a bus includes being older than their actual age by an unspecified amount.
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
Having worked with my kids through grade school, I think there's a deeper problem at play here. Teachers start children down this path by giving problems/examples that (they don't realize/or don't care) are subtlety flawed. If a child has the insight to point out such errors, the teacher usually isn't cognitively equipped to evaluate whether there is an error, and even those who are will usually give a "oh, don't worry about that, just go with it" response. The kids learn to stop questioning the reasonableness of the problems they're working on. This leads them to doing insane things like adding the number of sheep and goats to calculate the age of the captain.
U r absolutly right! Also friends and family r like that. I once had to work and left my boy with a neighbour who took him rowing. They did this for one hour and afterwards, he handed me my boy back, he was around 7, and told me, never again: This child was asking so many questions I told him, why r u asking questions like that (for example how much was the rubber boat, where did the rubber came from, my son was very intersted in boats at that age). I was quite shocked, that an adult person could shut a child up instead of answering and I was thinking if this would be your child, how can it develop intellectually...
@@tarot-karma-online that's crazy. As a kid i used to ask a lot of questions, especially in class. My classmates would groan everytime i had my hand in the air, but my teacher was very encouraging and used to say "everyone should ask all the questions they can, that's how you learn". Some of my colleagues eventually started asking more questions too, and their grades improved. She was actually a very good teacher.
The net result of questions like this is that they promote distrust, not critical thinking. If one wants to promote critical thinking, then one should teach that process, not use trick questions that will make some feel like fools for not recognizing a trick question. I have taught 7th grade through university and would never use such manipulative methods.
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.
I would actually like a study finding out how comfortable students are at challenging authority/asking questions of authority. My assumption is that kids trust that the problem is solvable by virtue of having a figure of authority (any adult) giving it to them. If you have a kid ask this of other kids, they'll likely point out the absurdity because they are amongst peers and more comfortable "challenging" each other.
Exactly. It’s one thing to try and encourage critical thinking, but it’s another thing to ask what is essentially a trick question. If someone were to explain all this to a student, their first thought would be how unfair and deceptive the question is, if their being asked to answer an impossible question on the assumption that there is a definitive answer. From a student’s POV, why would a teacher waste time asking a question that isn’t solvable.
Spot on! Kids are already very inclined to think that maths questions contain tricks or are deceptively framed(at least those of us who are not already trained to examine questions critically). Not good to pop this sort of thing on them without prior experience. Sort of thing you might do as a joke 😁. Not in a serious exam!
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.
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. Killer Queen has already touched this comment
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.
Old enough to be a ship's Captain. Whatever the case may be, this question obviously requires more information (call it thinking out-ot-the-box if you want) and illustrates a major flaw with all blanket type of test/questions including IQ test. Success on the exam is dependent on the educational and environmental history of the test taker. A question that someone can not answer which to you seems simple and thus conclude the individual is not very bright not knowing the answer is conceit; that person could pose you a question unanswerable by you -- so who now is not very bright. It is unkind to make light in such cases.
it requires information that isn't obtained through mathematics. You need to know the youngest age in that country that you're able to get a boat license. not math.
@@zdcgbkmdh1055 you clearly have never lived in China or experienced their educational system. The government is trying to change that, but tests are still mostly about completing them as fast as possible with no errors in the calculations. Knowing how to do then won't get you a pass, you have to complete the test quickly enough.
It did not say there was ONLY goats and sheep. I have a TV in my house. Now you can imagine me sitting in a completely empty house with nothing but a TV, but you would be wrong.
Subjagator I believe that in a math problem, if you don’t mention something, then you shouldn’t take it into consideration. If the problem was « there are 26X and 10Y in a bag; how many Z are in the bag? » I would just answer none.
@@augustinf Valid point, and if it was written as in some form of equation I would agree with you but it is written as a word problem. If I said I have 26 apples and 10 oranges in my fruit bowl, how many bananas do I have then it is the same as the original, the answer would be that there is not enough information because you never told me and the information you have provided isn't enough to calculate the answer. Another example, on the planet there are ~3.5 billion males and ~3.5 billion females, how many of them are children? The answer is clearly not 0, it is that there is not enough information.
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
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
The answer was actually “The horse’s name was Friday” But no, seriously, the reason people kept trying to manipulate the numbers is probably because math classes always give problems that are expected to be solvable unless otherwise specified. And almost never is “this is unsolvable” an option. Normally saying otherwise would get you punished or points taken. Which is kinda sad If you think about it… as people just assume every question has an answer. Since no math question could ever just not have one! Also as a side note it’s not too crazy of a question either when there’s talk of buying 500 watermelons
In applied mathematics the first question is always to figure out how to formulate a question and if it even is solvable with the available information. We really do kids dirty by training them that all math is a collection of solvable constants. It's no wonder we are all terrified of doing math when we go to college.
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
Good thought. If you’re not getting points off for a wrong answer, why not take a stab at it? And if you’ve never seen a question like this before, You could just assume that you’re missing something.It would be interesting to see what they would say if they were asked to explain their reasoning.
I agree. And also I don‘t think it‘s fair to test critical thinking skills with questions like these. When you‘re a student, and a teacher at school asks you a question, especially in a test, you‘d assume there is an answer, since that‘s just how tests work. I‘d bet if asked by a parent or friend in a more casual context, those kids would answer ”there is not enough info“.
Yes , it shows that students respect their teachers and they believe their teacher wouldn't ask any absurd questions but the teacher is trying to be an smartass
Thinking back on my own schooling, I’d be reluctant to give an answer like “There is not enough information.” Especially if I’d never received one like that before. Every other question I had been asked was solvable, why wouldn’t this one? Throwing questions like this at students once in a while would make them realize that being unable to answer a question is sometimes the right answer.
While the answer of "at least 28" shows an excellent knowledge of local laws that seems to suggest a lower bound on the solution, it really doesn't. Such an answer assumes the boat owner follows the law. If that boat owner is willing to disregard the law, the captain could very well be under 28. Yes, he would get in trouble if discovered, but there's always people willing to take that risk if they feel the reward is sufficient.
Somewhere in the video Sherlock Holmes is mentioned in reference to his famous methods of deduction. Being a fictional character his deductions are always correct. In the real world they would only represent a result with a probability less than one in fact considerably less than one. What is the point here ? Relating back to the ship's captain's problem : Is it not possible to assign a range of probability values as a function of his age ? I think the answer would be YES. Would such an answer depend on the other information regarding the onboard animals - obviously not. So the question as presented contains extraneous information on the one hand and insufficient relevant information on which an exact answer can be based. By contrast, In certain other cases we can have the problem of over-specification [ too much information ] leading to the fact that no conclusion is possible. [ A simple example would be three linear equations involving two unknowns ]
In Chinese there is only one pronoun: he. (Well historically, up until 1919 that was the case. Although they didn't finalize the word for the feminine pronoun until after the Chinese Civil War, so after 1949. So ok, they did finally acknowledge the existence of women in the 20th century. But given how patriarchal China remains even to this day, assuming the masculine pronoun is not only reasonable, but appropriate. And if you're not familiar with the way Chinese society and business operates, it is *extremely* reasonable to assume the business laws are being skirted or ignored. As much as we like to think of Confucius and Legalism and law and order when we think of Chinese people, there's a lot that goes on there that would no doubt shock the westerner given everything they think they know about Chinese people.)
I remember my physics teacher asking something like a bear drops a stone from some height (given) and hears it after some time T (given) then find the color of the bear. When you calculate it the value of g would come to be around 11, which is greater than the usual 9.8. Since g is maximum at the poles, the bear is a polar bear, and the colour is white.
@@disuser-lp3qv1tm8f 1. Earth is bulged out at equator, so distance is greater from centre than the poles. 2. Also, effect of centrifugal force due to earth's spin is maximum at equator
An interesting concept, though it technically presents insufficient data to come to a clear conclusion-it could have been a Grizzly bear that was transported to the north pole, for example.
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."_
Interviewer: What is the age of the captain? You: The captain is 44 years old. Interviewer: Wrong answer. You: I know him personally. Prove me wrong if you can or accept the answer.
Actually, you only think his name is "How old". It is Harold, but the Chinese have trouble pronouncing their "r" sound. So, now you know the rest of the story!
This is literally so crazy. When I was in 3th grade (Germany), exactly the same question with very similar wording appeared on one of our exams. I remember being frustrated with it and then finally writing down "not enough information" or "not solvable" (I don't remember exactly). However I remember explicitly how I was praised by the teacher once the exams had been marked. In a classs of 19, only me and another classmate had actually reached the conclusion that it could not be solved with the information offered. The rest of the class had manipulated the numbers so that he had a believable age. I never knew until know the relevance that this exact exercice had had - mindblowing
The real world would actually use this question to not enhance the critical thinking of humankind but to eliminate such kind. The real world is ruled by imbecile incompetent mobs who manipulate each and every aspect of their little world that they live in for their own perceived benefit. This question serves to filter out the ones who answered "not enough info" from "the system" in order to induct and foster more such incompetent manipulative individuals into "the system" At the age of 17 I had written two answers to a physics problem (from electrostatics) in one of the most highly regarded undergraduate entrance exams of the world. First answer to prove why the problem was not solvable with the knowledge and skills of a 12th grader and second answer showing how everyone else would solve the problem. I ended up as one of the toppers of the exam but that is beside the point. Today, after two and half decades later , I spend my time fighting court cases for proving open and shut cases that "the system" does not allow to be proven for the sake of vested interests of many such manipulative individuals. PS: For those interested in the electrostatics problem, here it is - th-cam.com/video/Xd7XmVvOoUY/w-d-xo.html (The video explains the second solution that I wrote in the exam paper)
Honestly, I can’t blame your classmates. They did what seemed reasonable, which is finding an answer. We recognise patterns. When we are asked a seeming math question on a math exam, we naturally want to just do math. When we are asked an absurd question, we try to find logic within, which is a completely rational response.
My boss gave me this question in 1986 when I interviewed with him. I answered very quickly and said. The number of animals is just a statement. The age of the captain is a question. So I said, easy, greater than 0 (>0) assuming the captain has to be a biological being that has been born. Even a newborn could be given an honorary commission as a ship's captain. That is why I didn't state years, just greater than 0. He was very impressed. He had heard "unknown" and "insufficient info" a few times before, but never my answer "greater than 0". I use this in my STEM class now.
@@ailanasalvi5399 I agree, there has to be limits. I use this question to start a discussion with my STEM students on results sometimes being indeterminate. I stress that they are normally the exception and if you start "running home" often to the answer "indeterminate" something is wrong. Then we go on to discuss 1 divided by 0... that is a fun topic.
@Deb Chambers I still like my answer: The age of the captain is >0. But you make an interesting point, consider other universes where an unborn child could still be captain - maybe commanding the ship telepathically from the womb... the possibilities are endless. So, as long as one doesn't give a definitive age that cannot be rationalized, or say not enough info, then the answer is correct. But if one said, say, 32, and then asked why and have no logical backup for that answer, then one would be wrong. The problem with this question is it could never be on objective test, as soon as one saw choice 'E' (not enough info) that would give away the answer.
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.
A few others have mentioned this, but I think the students thought the following: I don't know how to solve this, so I must be missing something. I'm supposed to be able to solve this with the information given, since that's the point of this class. I know that's what I thought, and I'm a teenager. After they thought that, they just took their best guess based off of what they knew. For anybody curious, my next step, as a teenager in advanced math classes, would have been to see if goats take a significantly longer time to reproduce than sheep, and if they do, write an equation where you start with x goats and y sheep (variables vary) and end up with z years to get the desired number of sheep and goats, plus a minimum age for the captain (I'd look up the minimum age to captain a boat in China, as well). However, as I was working out that I'd solve it this way, I discovered that I was still assuming too much, and - get this! - *still* thought there was an actual way to solve it. I clicked on the video to see how. When people are given a math problem in a setting where they feel there should be an answer, I argue that they *should* assume they are missing how to solve it, rather than that it's a trick question. Knowledge of processes is often lacking, and it's better to assume that you don't know how to do something than to assume it can't be done. In a way, that's how the imaginary number was invented. We had quadratic equations that we couldn't solve with the quadratic formula, so instead of giving up, we made a way for it to work. In a classroom setting, trust is also an aspect. The students are there to learn and to use what they have learned to prove they've learned it. That is the point of the class. If they are given a problem, it is entirely reasonable to assume it has an answer unless they're told otherwise because that's the point of the class. You're learning, and you're tested on what you've been told to learn. You're not learning, tested on what you've been told to learn, and asked a random, unsolvable question because that's not the purpose of the test.
I'm 16 and also in advanced math classes and I the first thing I always do is look at what the problem is asking for and what it gives me to solve it. In this problem, the question is about the age of the captain and they give the number of animals on his ship. I knew that I couldn't produce an age from what was given so I didn't try. Even if you're in a classroom, you should always check the solvability of every question you are given. Why waste a you're time on a question that you can't solve.
@@delanmorstik7619 If the problem is solvable, you aren't wasting time. But with problems like this, read it, understand it, then ask yourself "Can I solve this". If you can't solve from the info given, move on.
@@braylon4125 But then we will never achieve progress, will we? Maybe I didn’t learn how to solve it before or there’s a formula that I don’t know of. Knowledge is all about going into the unknown and unexplainable, otherwise we would’ve been living in a completely different world. So, I’d try solving it the same way the commenter suggested. Never underestimate your capabilities and never stop seeking knowledge. 🌷
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 think this is a problem with authority and trust. Kids are taught their whole school life that any question a teacher asks is solvable even if they don't see the way to solve it immediately. So even with this nonsensical question, they will not question if it even *has* an answer, because their teacher asked, and if he did so, there *must* be one. Of course, teaching students to question authority (of the teacher, in this case ) might not be a bad thing! On the other hand-do teachers really *want* that? Do they want students to scrutinize and challenge their every word and instruction?
Runoratsu T: Abe ate a quarter of pizza. Bob ate a third. Abe ate more pizza than Bob. How can this be? S: Abe's pizza is larger. T: Wrong! The answer is "Not possible!" Everybody else: Huh? The teacher is wrong! The student is right!
Runoratsu I'm curious as to what your stance is regarding teacher's credibility. If students are forced to learn strictly obeying the teacher, then a lot of common core materials will hurt students. But if students are allowed to question the teacher, learning process maybe slowed down significantly. There should be some kind of middle ground for it, but where exactly we draw the line?
This reminds me of a multiple choice test which had the following question: The Apollo project: a. has not yet been started b. was cancelled before it started c. has not yet been completed d. has already been completed Since it was 1976 I chose "d", that it has already been completed. The teacher marked it wrong saying that the correct answer was "c" because that is what the book said. So I was punished for being more current than the textbook.
I think the teacher just assumed that we would know that we should answer according to the book instead of according to reality. Students who gave answer d should have gotten extra credit for knowing the book was wrong.
I just think what he did was unacceptable. I had an english teacher once, who punished for using words, not found in her materials. I can tell you, it made writing essays REALLY frustrating.
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?
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...
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.
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
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 TH-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
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."
"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.
*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
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.
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.
@@QbutNotTheQrun on sentences are extremely fascinating, as they often times represent a person's train of thought, where one thought leads to another thought, and another one, without any tangents that distract them, the esscense of which is perfectly encapsulated in these, long, long sentences that seem to go on with no end, and to which I must pose a question; have there been any studies about how people manage to write run-on sentences, and if there is any correlation between the average length of one, and how advanced the writer may be in such a topic?
This is definitely a big problem. I have encountered it as well. In the context of school, you are nearly always given questions that have solutions. If you do not find a solution, the majority of the time it is because you as the student have done something wrong. It gets even worse with multiple-choice problems, specifically in the context of ACT/SAT/ITBS and similar standardized tests because you will be given a choice between multiple apparently correct answers and you must chose the one that is more correct than the others. In the case where you have an option of "D) None of the above," that will rarely be the correct choice and is only a good choice if you can eliminate all the other possible answers from the list.
Basically the dynamics of how schooling is taught will train an individual to assume that each question will have the information necessary to solve it. If it appears that there is not enough information, it MUST be because the student is missing some critical element of the question. Therefore there MUST be some way that the information contained in the question fits together in order to arrive at an answer.
I actually ran into this issue in college. I did not go through the traditional public school system as a child, and thus was unaware of this particular bias in education. Imagine my surprise when I got a failing grade on an English writing assignment -- not because of poor punctuation, spelling, or grammar, but because I pointed out that there was a contradiction in the lecture we were using as the basis of the assignment. I was informed by my scholastic advisor that if a professor is looking for answer "A" and I know that answer "A" is wrong, I must still give answer "A" in order to complete the assignment. After giving answer "A," it is acceptable to add "however it is my opinion that answer "B" may also be correct in some cases" though you may still lose some points depending on the professor.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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 ☺
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
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
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
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
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.
It’s scary how many people don’t read the questions. An elementary teacher taught me a process for solving these that has stuck to me till date:
(C)ircle the numbers
(U)nderline the question
(B)ox important words [like units]
(E)valuate importance [or (E)liminate unnecessary information]
(S)olve
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
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.
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
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.
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.
@BELIEVE in JESUS So how old do you think the captain is?
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."
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
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.
I also think there is an expectation, especially at the age that was being tested here, that if you are in a math class, you are there to solve math, not solve riddles, and so people did the most logical math calculation that the problem presented them, even if it didn't really make sense. They probably expected to be told how it actually made sense later. Maybe that's the same thing as you're saying, but most kids aren't going to evaluate math problems they are presented to see whether they are solvable or not. Most things they get asked in class they are going to (probably rightly) assume are solveable.
Kids at that age aren’t taught that a null answer is an acceptable response. At least I wasn’t until about 5th grade.
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
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".
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
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.
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 TH-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.
"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
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
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.
Or it means the sheep and goats are no longer on the ship
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
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
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.
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...........
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.
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
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 :)
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".
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😂
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.
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 TH-cam at 2 in the morning?
I appreciate the fact that it rhymes.
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.
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.
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
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?
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."
Problem with that is that the student is unlikely to be old enough to actually be a bus driver. So part of the hypothetical situation of them driving a bus includes being older than their actual age by an unspecified amount.
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 :(
Having worked with my kids through grade school, I think there's a deeper problem at play here. Teachers start children down this path by giving problems/examples that (they don't realize/or don't care) are subtlety flawed. If a child has the insight to point out such errors, the teacher usually isn't cognitively equipped to evaluate whether there is an error, and even those who are will usually give a "oh, don't worry about that, just go with it" response. The kids learn to stop questioning the reasonableness of the problems they're working on. This leads them to doing insane things like adding the number of sheep and goats to calculate the age of the captain.
@@thekatvita Imagine going to the store and asking for 2 cans and a quart
@@thekatvita I remember that kind of question but your answer of 3 would be the right one because you can't buy a quarter can of paint.
U r absolutly right! Also friends and family r like that. I once had to work and left my boy with a neighbour who took him rowing. They did this for one hour and afterwards, he handed me my boy back, he was around 7, and told me, never again: This child was asking so many questions I told him, why r u asking questions like that (for example how much was the rubber boat, where did the rubber came from, my son was very intersted in boats at that age). I was quite shocked, that an adult person could shut a child up instead of answering and I was thinking if this would be your child, how can it develop intellectually...
Yeah it's exclusovist and able ist too
@@tarot-karma-online that's crazy. As a kid i used to ask a lot of questions, especially in class. My classmates would groan everytime i had my hand in the air, but my teacher was very encouraging and used to say "everyone should ask all the questions they can, that's how you learn". Some of my colleagues eventually started asking more questions too, and their grades improved. She was actually a very good 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
?
@@stefantrandafir1099 erau sarcastici..
Scrolled looking for this! Lol
Phoebeeeee
The net result of questions like this is that they promote distrust, not critical thinking. If one wants to promote critical thinking, then one should teach that process, not use trick questions that will make some feel like fools for not recognizing a trick question. I have taught 7th grade through university and would never use such manipulative methods.
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.
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.
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
I would actually like a study finding out how comfortable students are at challenging authority/asking questions of authority. My assumption is that kids trust that the problem is solvable by virtue of having a figure of authority (any adult) giving it to them. If you have a kid ask this of other kids, they'll likely point out the absurdity because they are amongst peers and more comfortable "challenging" each other.
Exactly. It’s one thing to try and encourage critical thinking, but it’s another thing to ask what is essentially a trick question. If someone were to explain all this to a student, their first thought would be how unfair and deceptive the question is, if their being asked to answer an impossible question on the assumption that there is a definitive answer. From a student’s POV, why would a teacher waste time asking a question that isn’t solvable.
Spot on! Kids are already very inclined to think that maths questions contain tricks or are deceptively framed(at least those of us who are not already trained to examine questions critically). Not good to pop this sort of thing on them without prior experience. Sort of thing you might do as a joke 😁. Not in a serious exam!
It could be a tradition to give a ship Captain a Goat each year ?
I was brought up to question authority 🙂
@@lyrimetacurl0
God?
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.
Killer Queen has already touched this comment
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.
But you forgot to mention that it was originally a French research question from nearly 40 years ago
Sleep 😂😂
NEARLY 40 YEARS!
Professional Meme Enthusiast good job Sherlock, critical thinking at its best
bbbbende
Someone didn't get the joke and deleted their comment
Professional Meme Enthusiast yes, it was shown on the number of replies that one was missing, so I figured that out already
Old enough to be a ship's Captain.
Whatever the case may be, this question obviously requires more information (call it thinking out-ot-the-box if you want) and illustrates a major flaw with all blanket type of test/questions including IQ test. Success on the exam is dependent on the educational and environmental history of the test taker. A question that someone can not answer which to you seems simple and thus conclude the individual is not very bright not knowing the answer is conceit; that person could pose you a question unanswerable by you -- so who now is not very bright. It is unkind to make light in such cases.
It's not a math problem. End of story.
Yes i is still math, but in an upper theoritical level.
it requires information that isn't obtained through mathematics. You need to know the youngest age in that country that you're able to get a boat license. not math.
@@marin4311 but every animal has different weight. Like, your dog and your friend's dog (*FOR EXAMPLE*) obviously have different weight
Agree!
After reading the replies here, my stomach aches.
"it was meant to be open ended to encourage critical thinking, which is usually not present in math class"
Usually not encouraged in China either
your comment is quite ironic- open mindness seems to not be encouraged in yourself either :D
@@zdcgbkmdh1055 his reference is to China's national communist policy that discourages divergent religions and non-communist politics.
@@zdcgbkmdh1055 you clearly have never lived in China or experienced their educational system. The government is trying to change that, but tests are still mostly about completing them as fast as possible with no errors in the calculations. Knowing how to do then won't get you a pass, you have to complete the test quickly enough.
Dude the problem is still BS how are children supposed to know how old you are required to be to have over 5 tones of cargo on a ship
@@stefanwalicord2512 China's government for sure does not encourage critical thinking, but religion neither!
I’m sorry but there are only sheep and goats on board, none of them qualify to be a captain.there is no captain on that ship.
It did not say there was ONLY goats and sheep. I have a TV in my house. Now you can imagine me sitting in a completely empty house with nothing but a TV, but you would be wrong.
This might be the real answer... Hmmmm
Why is this so low? This is the best answer in the comments by far.
Subjagator I believe that in a math problem, if you don’t mention something, then you shouldn’t take it into consideration. If the problem was « there are 26X and 10Y in a bag; how many Z are in the bag? » I would just answer none.
@@augustinf
Valid point, and if it was written as in some form of equation I would agree with you but it is written as a word problem. If I said I have 26 apples and 10 oranges in my fruit bowl, how many bananas do I have then it is the same as the original, the answer would be that there is not enough information because you never told me and the information you have provided isn't enough to calculate the answer. Another example, on the planet there are ~3.5 billion males and ~3.5 billion females, how many of them are children? The answer is clearly not 0, it is that there is not enough information.
Answer: Tuesday, because spiders don't wear Adidas.
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 answer was actually “The horse’s name was Friday”
But no, seriously, the reason people kept trying to manipulate the numbers is probably because math classes always give problems that are expected to be solvable unless otherwise specified. And almost never is “this is unsolvable” an option.
Normally saying otherwise would get you punished or points taken. Which is kinda sad If you think about it… as people just assume every question has an answer. Since no math question could ever just not have one!
Also as a side note it’s not too crazy of a question either when there’s talk of buying 500 watermelons
" it’s not too crazy of a question either when there’s talk of buying 500 watermelons" ahahaha!
Yeah, basically, they played the students dirty.
In applied mathematics the first question is always to figure out how to formulate a question and if it even is solvable with the available information. We really do kids dirty by training them that all math is a collection of solvable constants. It's no wonder we are all terrified of doing math when we go to college.
what students expect there to be a specific right answer.? in math.? what a shock 🤦🏼♀️
Today is Friday in California.
th-cam.com/video/9WaYCdQ8FOQ/w-d-xo.html
"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
If my car has a flat tire, and my neighbor is at work, how many coins are in my pocket?
This video could've been 30 seconds.
Agreed
haha, i was generous enough to give it 2mins. but 30sec is totally possible.
I would have done it in 10.
Gotta get that ad revenue
this reply could have been 0 words.
"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?😅
I think, that the students knew that it is a nonsense but still tried it cause if it somehow actually made sense they would get the points.
Good thought. If you’re not getting points off for a wrong answer, why not take a stab at it? And if you’ve never seen a question like this before, You could just assume that you’re missing something.It would be interesting to see what they would say if they were asked to explain their reasoning.
I agree. And also I don‘t think it‘s fair to test critical thinking skills with questions like these. When you‘re a student, and a teacher at school asks you a question, especially in a test, you‘d assume there is an answer, since that‘s just how tests work. I‘d bet if asked by a parent or friend in a more casual context, those kids would answer ”there is not enough info“.
Yes , it shows that students respect their teachers and they believe their teacher wouldn't ask any absurd questions but the teacher is trying to be an smartass
@@abdulmoid267 the students' respect have been betrayed
@@CptSeighter123 i think there's some dissent here about what's being tested ^^
Thinking back on my own schooling, I’d be reluctant to give an answer like “There is not enough information.” Especially if I’d never received one like that before. Every other question I had been asked was solvable, why wouldn’t this one? Throwing questions like this at students once in a while would make them realize that being unable to answer a question is sometimes the right answer.
Random goat: look at me, I'm the captain now
While the answer of "at least 28" shows an excellent knowledge of local laws that seems to suggest a lower bound on the solution, it really doesn't. Such an answer assumes the boat owner follows the law. If that boat owner is willing to disregard the law, the captain could very well be under 28. Yes, he would get in trouble if discovered, but there's always people willing to take that risk if they feel the reward is sufficient.
Somewhere in the video Sherlock Holmes is mentioned in reference to his famous methods of deduction. Being a fictional character his deductions are always correct. In the real world they would only represent a result with a probability less than one in fact considerably less than one. What is the point here ? Relating back to the ship's captain's problem : Is it not possible to assign a range of probability values as a function of his age ?
I think the answer would be YES. Would such an answer depend on the other information regarding the onboard animals - obviously not.
So the question as presented contains extraneous information on the one hand and insufficient relevant information on which an exact answer can be based.
By contrast, In certain other cases we can have the problem of over-specification [ too much information ] leading to the fact that no conclusion is possible. [ A simple example would be three linear equations involving two unknowns ]
it also doesn't specify in the question that the captain is a he
In Chinese there is only one pronoun: he.
(Well historically, up until 1919 that was the case. Although they didn't finalize the word for the feminine pronoun until after the Chinese Civil War, so after 1949. So ok, they did finally acknowledge the existence of women in the 20th century. But given how patriarchal China remains even to this day, assuming the masculine pronoun is not only reasonable, but appropriate.
And if you're not familiar with the way Chinese society and business operates, it is *extremely* reasonable to assume the business laws are being skirted or ignored. As much as we like to think of Confucius and Legalism and law and order when we think of Chinese people, there's a lot that goes on there that would no doubt shock the westerner given everything they think they know about Chinese people.)
What if the captain were born on Feb 29, in a leap year? Then he'd be 7.
He doesn't have to be Chinese either.
I remember my physics teacher asking something like a bear drops a stone from some height (given) and hears it after some time T (given) then find the color of the bear.
When you calculate it the value of g would come to be around 11, which is greater than the usual 9.8. Since g is maximum at the poles, the bear is a polar bear, and the colour is white.
I thought g was maximum at the equator (closer to the Earth's core).
@@disuser-lp3qv1tm8f
1. Earth is bulged out at equator, so distance is greater from centre than the poles.
2. Also, effect of centrifugal force due to earth's spin is maximum at equator
That’s amazing.
Almost any question that ends with "what colour was the bear" will have the answer "white"
An interesting concept, though it technically presents insufficient data to come to a clear conclusion-it could have been a Grizzly bear that was transported to the north pole, for example.
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."_
Interviewer: What is the age of the captain?
You: The captain is 44 years old.
Interviewer: Wrong answer.
You: I know him personally. Prove me wrong if you can or accept the answer.
Interviewer: Prove me that you know him, if you can’t this information is not valuable.
@@kasimirdelataillade163 I know him personally. It's a personal information, can't give more details about it
Interviewer: Well, in that case, this information is not valuable.
@@kasimirdelataillade163 you to interviewer: good, so you get the job. congratulations.
interviewer: this doesnt make sense
you: nothing does
Exactly
What if the sheep and goats are being smuggled? Then the captain might be unlicensed and younger!
The name of the captain is how old
So how old isn't a question
If there is a question mark at the end of the sentence then it is a question. Or a typo.
BEST ANSWER!!! 👏👏👏👏👏
@@Subjagator "Subjugator is the captain? Yes. Yes, s/he is the captain."
Actually, you only think his name is "How old". It is Harold, but the Chinese have trouble pronouncing their "r" sound. So, now you know the rest of the story!
@@bruzote hahaha
I thought the answer was "there is no captain" as the ship only has sheep and goats-
This is literally so crazy. When I was in 3th grade (Germany), exactly the same question with very similar wording appeared on one of our exams. I remember being frustrated with it and then finally writing down "not enough information" or "not solvable" (I don't remember exactly). However I remember explicitly how I was praised by the teacher once the exams had been marked. In a classs of 19, only me and another classmate had actually reached the conclusion that it could not be solved with the information offered. The rest of the class had manipulated the numbers so that he had a believable age. I never knew until know the relevance that this exact exercice had had - mindblowing
The real world would actually use this question to not enhance the critical thinking of humankind but to eliminate such kind.
The real world is ruled by imbecile incompetent mobs who manipulate each and every aspect of their little world that they live in for their own perceived benefit.
This question serves to filter out the ones who answered "not enough info" from "the system" in order to induct and foster more such incompetent manipulative individuals into "the system"
At the age of 17 I had written two answers to a physics problem (from electrostatics) in one of the most highly regarded undergraduate entrance exams of the world. First answer to prove why the problem was not solvable with the knowledge and skills of a 12th grader and second answer showing how everyone else would solve the problem.
I ended up as one of the toppers of the exam but that is beside the point. Today, after two and half decades later , I spend my time fighting court cases for proving open and shut cases that "the system" does not allow to be proven for the sake of vested interests of many such manipulative individuals.
PS:
For those interested in the electrostatics problem, here it is -
th-cam.com/video/Xd7XmVvOoUY/w-d-xo.html
(The video explains the second solution that I wrote in the exam paper)
"Hochbegabung" detected
Honestly, I can’t blame your classmates. They did what seemed reasonable, which is finding an answer. We recognise patterns. When we are asked a seeming math question on a math exam, we naturally want to just do math. When we are asked an absurd question, we try to find logic within, which is a completely rational response.
My boss gave me this question in 1986 when I interviewed with him. I answered very quickly and said. The number of animals is just a statement. The age of the captain is a question. So I said, easy, greater than 0 (>0) assuming the captain has to be a biological being that has been born. Even a newborn could be given an honorary commission as a ship's captain. That is why I didn't state years, just greater than 0. He was very impressed. He had heard "unknown" and "insufficient info" a few times before, but never my answer "greater than 0". I use this in my STEM class now.
I like your way of thinking
@@obnoxiouscommenter6194 Thanks, my boss did too! My students love this puzzle.
I thougt something similar but you have to put a limit and various asumptions.
@@ailanasalvi5399 I agree, there has to be limits. I use this question to start a discussion with my STEM students on results sometimes being indeterminate. I stress that they are normally the exception and if you start "running home" often to the answer "indeterminate" something is wrong. Then we go on to discuss 1 divided by 0... that is a fun topic.
@Deb Chambers I still like my answer: The age of the captain is >0. But you make an interesting point, consider other universes where an unborn child could still be captain - maybe commanding the ship telepathically from the womb... the possibilities are endless. So, as long as one doesn't give a definitive age that cannot be rationalized, or say not enough info, then the answer is correct. But if one said, say, 32, and then asked why and have no logical backup for that answer, then one would be wrong. The problem with this question is it could never be on objective test, as soon as one saw choice 'E' (not enough info) that would give away the answer.
Math explained by teacher:2+2=4
Homework: ∫(xsinx)dx=
Math on an exam:
The solution is xsin x to the homework
@@얼음물-g2f yes lol but if we remove the dx then it becomes -xcos x + sinx i think
You all forgot the +C
@@css2538 omg true
Real life problem: finding a remote after your x left you.
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.
He's old enough to realize he should have had some cows too
Bull! ;)
These are great
U got me
John has 10 candies, he ate 9, what does he have now?
ans: diabetes
Ans: John has 1 Candy, Now. Because,
10 candies - 9 candies = 1 candy.
So, John has 1 Candy.
I read candle, lol
Arifa Refayet r/wooosh
@@samueljll5592 helo my felow disleksick fren!
@@samueljll5592 i too
A few others have mentioned this, but I think the students thought the following:
I don't know how to solve this, so I must be missing something. I'm supposed to be able to solve this with the information given, since that's the point of this class.
I know that's what I thought, and I'm a teenager. After they thought that, they just took their best guess based off of what they knew.
For anybody curious, my next step, as a teenager in advanced math classes, would have been to see if goats take a significantly longer time to reproduce than sheep, and if they do, write an equation where you start with x goats and y sheep (variables vary) and end up with z years to get the desired number of sheep and goats, plus a minimum age for the captain (I'd look up the minimum age to captain a boat in China, as well). However, as I was working out that I'd solve it this way, I discovered that I was still assuming too much, and - get this! - *still* thought there was an actual way to solve it. I clicked on the video to see how.
When people are given a math problem in a setting where they feel there should be an answer, I argue that they *should* assume they are missing how to solve it, rather than that it's a trick question. Knowledge of processes is often lacking, and it's better to assume that you don't know how to do something than to assume it can't be done. In a way, that's how the imaginary number was invented. We had quadratic equations that we couldn't solve with the quadratic formula, so instead of giving up, we made a way for it to work.
In a classroom setting, trust is also an aspect. The students are there to learn and to use what they have learned to prove they've learned it. That is the point of the class. If they are given a problem, it is entirely reasonable to assume it has an answer unless they're told otherwise because that's the point of the class. You're learning, and you're tested on what you've been told to learn. You're not learning, tested on what you've been told to learn, and asked a random, unsolvable question because that's not the purpose of the test.
I'm 16 and also in advanced math classes and I the first thing I always do is look at what the problem is asking for and what it gives me to solve it. In this problem, the question is about the age of the captain and they give the number of animals on his ship. I knew that I couldn't produce an age from what was given so I didn't try. Even if you're in a classroom, you should always check the solvability of every question you are given. Why waste a you're time on a question that you can't solve.
@@braylon4125 Why waste time on a question you CAN solve?
@@delanmorstik7619 If the problem is solvable, you aren't wasting time. But with problems like this, read it, understand it, then ask yourself "Can I solve this". If you can't solve from the info given, move on.
@@braylon4125 But then we will never achieve progress, will we? Maybe I didn’t learn how to solve it before or there’s a formula that I don’t know of. Knowledge is all about going into the unknown and unexplainable, otherwise we would’ve been living in a completely different world. So, I’d try solving it the same way the commenter suggested. Never underestimate your capabilities and never stop seeking knowledge. 🌷
Yes, but students thinking "that's the point of this class" illustrates the point that they aren't taught critical thinking.
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 think this is a problem with authority and trust. Kids are taught their whole school life that any question a teacher asks is solvable even if they don't see the way to solve it immediately. So even with this nonsensical question, they will not question if it even *has* an answer, because their teacher asked, and if he did so, there *must* be one.
Of course, teaching students to question authority (of the teacher, in this case ) might not be a bad thing! On the other hand-do teachers really *want* that? Do they want students to scrutinize and challenge their every word and instruction?
Runoratsu
T: Abe ate a quarter of pizza. Bob ate a third. Abe ate more pizza than Bob. How can this be?
S: Abe's pizza is larger.
T: Wrong! The answer is "Not possible!"
Everybody else: Huh? The teacher is wrong! The student is right!
Uhhh… so what exactly do you want to tell me with this? ô.o
Runoratsu I'm curious as to what your stance is regarding teacher's credibility. If students are forced to learn strictly obeying the teacher, then a lot of common core materials will hurt students. But if students are allowed to question the teacher, learning process maybe slowed down significantly. There should be some kind of middle ground for it, but where exactly we draw the line?
Oh, I'm all for questioning authority, both the teachers' and anywhere else in life! I just think most teachers wouldn't like it.
Runoratsu not with me, if I find an unsoleable question I will ask for sure
This reminds me of a multiple choice test which had the following question:
The Apollo project:
a. has not yet been started
b. was cancelled before it started
c. has not yet been completed
d. has already been completed
Since it was 1976 I chose "d", that it has already been completed. The teacher marked it wrong saying that the correct answer was "c" because that is what the book said.
So I was punished for being more current than the textbook.
WF6I
That's bull.
Actually, it's all true, the funny thing is that she was one of my favorite teachers.
It's actually wrong on every level, if the question did not specifically state *according to X*, at the end.
I think the teacher just assumed that we would know that we should answer according to the book instead of according to reality. Students who gave answer d should have gotten extra credit for knowing the book was wrong.
I just think what he did was unacceptable. I had an english teacher once, who punished for using words, not found in her materials. I can tell you, it made writing essays REALLY frustrating.
If john has 5 apples, and bob has 3, what is the mass of the sun?
j-quizzle
$5 and 27 seal pups.
About 3.14 copies of Shrek 3 on dvd
Is it beef?
One solar mass.
j-quizzle 4 Shrek Skechers
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?