Thursday, March 12, 2015

Seventy Times Seven

At the risk of alienating all of my readers, here's another "Kids Say the Darndest Things" post. (For the third week in a row!) This one was featured in the March 2015 issue of the New Era.
Posted by Arie Van De Graaff at 6:38 AM
Labels: , ,

4 comments:

  1. Arie Van De GraaffMarch 12, 2015 at 6:41 AM

    Someone at the New Era changed the equation from "70 x 7 - 34" to "70 x 7 - 4." I guess that someone didn't like the idea of a big brother picking on his sister 34 times. (I suspect that someone also never had a big brother.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMarch 12, 2015 at 11:56 AM

    The New Era editor, apart from being inexperienced in the ways of older brothers, also missed an opportunity to insert parentheses to clarify the math. This equation is presumable (70 x 7) - 4 (which comes to 486), based on the scriptural reference. A change in the placement of the parentheses would have worked in the kid's favor: 70 x (7 - 4) = 210, a considerably smaller sum of mea culpas.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Arie Van De GraaffMarch 12, 2015 at 2:04 PM

      Whether you got to 486 or 210, I won't share, dear big brother.

      Delete
    2. TeachersRule101May 15, 2016 at 7:50 PM

      However, when you use PEMDAS, the multiplication ends up going first anyways.

      Delete

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