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Almost every situation for which I have needed mathematics outside the classroom has been a "word problem". Nobody has ever simply come to me and asked me to mu

Almost every situation for which I have needed mathematics outside the classroom has been a "word problem". Nobody has ever simply come to me and asked me to multiply two numbers together and then add the result to something else. Instead, I get word problems like "how long is this task going to take, if we can give you this much resource?" and "how long is it going to take to drive from A to B at this time, given this knowledge of traffic conditions?" and "what's the best tradeoff of time spent travelling against airfare, to travel from here to there, given these limiting conditions?" and so on and so on. Word problems don't exist? Nonsense.

unabst 11y ago
Where are the gotchas and purposefully ambiguous terms? And none of those are difficult math problems either. Regarding traffic, a smart human (including students) would just refer to an app on their phone. There is a clear line between problems described with words, and these "word problems". The topic was about math, but physics is worse. My high school physics teacher had a hobby of writing to text book publishers about how "silly" some problems were. They're designed to be difficult and relevant to specific material, but in the process reality goes out the window.