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Stop making excuses. Learn to comprehend. Here's the problem "An ant starts to crawl along a taut rubber rope 1 km long at a speed of 1 cm per second (relati
by segmondy 13y ago
Stop making excuses. Learn to comprehend.
Here's the problem
"An ant starts to crawl along a taut rubber rope 1 km long at a speed of 1 cm per second (relative to the rubber it is crawling on).
At the same time, the rope starts to stretch by 1 km per second (so that after 1 second it is 2 km long, after 2 seconds it is 3 km long, etc).
Will the ant ever reach the end of the rope?"
What is so hard and frustrating about figuring this out? If you over think it, blame yourself. This has nothing to do about ants, rubber, gravity, energy, it's a simple question, solving it is not so simple. But if you think of it in a simple form, you can intuitively see that the ant can reach the end of the rope.
- lowboy 13y agoI think that parent's complaint is that we come into the word problem with loaded expectations from our real life experience, and these distract from the core of the word problem. I don't see a way around it, but it's a valid complaint about word problems that involve unusual scenarios. The "One train leaves blah, other train leaves blah, find where they cross paths" word problem is in tune with the real world, whereas an infinitely stretchy rubber band with an ant isn't.