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Poor Numeracy 'blights The Economy And Ruins Lives'


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HOLA441
....says a new charity launched to champion better maths skills.

The group, National Numeracy, says millions of people struggle to understand a payslip or a train timetable, or pay a household bill.

Government figures show almost half the working population of England have only primary school maths skills.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17224600

And the other third aren't much cop.

I expect it's all that music and movement and 60's trained teachers who thought that expressing yourself was really important.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17224600

And the other third aren't much cop.

I expect it's all that music and movement and 60's trained teachers who thought that expressing yourself was really important.

They will come up with all sorts of tosh as to why there are so many unemployed, they know what the real reason is and that is that the country is saturated with people of working age for the jobs that the country has, and it is only going to get worse as mass immigration is allowed to carry on and the retirement age is increased.

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HOLA446

You only have to look at the number of people arguing that "the banks need to start lending" to realise that there's only a small percentage of the population who actually understand numeracy/economics. Most just trust the opinions of those that fit with their desires. Hence they listen to the property VIs because they are promising the golden goose, houses never loose value and you can sell up and retire on your the value of your home. They never ask where will they be living when they retire on their "pension".

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Headline on the BBC this morning said "Half of adults only have the maths skills of a primary school pupil"

Now maybe I'm one of those who is bad at maths but surely if half the adult population has the maths skills of a primary school pupil then they also have the maths skills of an average adult?

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HOLA449

Headline on the BBC this morning said "Half of adults only have the maths skills of a primary school pupil"

Now maybe I'm one of those who is bad at maths but surely if half the adult population has the maths skills of a primary school pupil then they also have the maths skills of an average adult?

Primary school pupils in the UK have the maths skills of half the adult population!

Cor blimey guv, we have bright children in this country! :D

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Immigration has been a problem but now in recent threads about the mini-slums in England, it seems that the wheels are falling off for mass immigration when the menial work has dried up and illegal immigrants who are now homeless or in garage hovels are now WANTING TO GO BACK TO THEIR HOMELANDS (another bubble bursting).

Edited by Big Orange
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..the real reason is and that is that the country is saturated with people of working age for the jobs that the country has, and it is only going to get worse as mass immigration is allowed to carry on and the retirement age is increased.

A country does not have a limit to the number of jobs - just a limit on the number of people with the wit to do useful work. The definition of what is useful has changed, and decades of progressive teaching has left people too thick, too precious and too lazy to adapt.

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Perhaps we need to make maths sexier...

Pretty Little Polynomial and Curly Pi

Once upon a time (1/t) pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now Polly was convergent, and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never, ever enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient, and made her way in amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides. Tangents approached her surface, and she became tenser and tenser. Quite suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, became unstable, lost all sense of directrix, tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf, and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. She was completely divergent by the time she reached the turning point. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone in a non-euclidean space.

She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, was she convergent? He decided to integrate improperly at once.

Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his lower series extended. She could see at once his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms, and knew he was irrational. "Arcsinh!" she gasped.

"Hey, what's your sine?" he asked. "What a symmetric set of asymptotes you have!"

"Stay away from me!" she protested. "I haven't got any brackets on!"

"Calm yourself, my dear!" said the smooth operator.. "Your fears are purely imaginary."

"i, i, ..." she thought, "Perhaps he's not normal, but homologous."

"What order are you?" the brute suddenly demanded.

"Seventeen," replied Polly.

Curly leered, "I suppose you've never been operated upon?"

"Of course not. I'm absolutely convergent!" Polly replied quite properly.

"Come on," said Curly: "Let's go to decimal place I know of, and I'll take you to the limit."

"Never!" gasped Polly..

"Abscissa!" he swore a violent oath. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places, and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly Nomial! The algorithm method was now her only hope. She felt him approaching her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever. There was no mercy; Curly was a heavy side operator. His radius squared itself and Polly's loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed Runge-Kutta on her. He even went all the way around and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he satisfied her hypotheses, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally, they took her to L'Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.

The moral of this tale is: "If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom."

fts.jpg

post-17279-0-93527800-1330690798_thumb.jpg

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HOLA4418

A country does not have a limit to the number of jobs - just a limit on the number of people with the wit to do useful work. The definition of what is useful has changed, and decades of progressive teaching has left people too thick, too precious and too lazy to adapt.

This country has a limit to the amount of jobs it has and this is linked to the size of the economy.

In previous decades as the population grew so did industry and jobs etc. to supply these people, the population is growing now yet most of the increase in goods to supply this increase are from abroad were many of our former industry's have gone,

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HOLA4419

You only have to look at the number of people arguing that "the banks need to start lending" to realise that there's only a small percentage of the population who actually understand numeracy/economics. Most just trust the opinions of those that fit with their desires. Hence they listen to the property VIs because they are promising the golden goose, houses never loose value and you can sell up and retire on your the value of your home. They never ask where will they be living when they retire on their "pension".

just to counter this;

look at the cost of building materials

most quotes are now 15 days - price volatility ie northwards

energy costs only go on way

building stuff is pricey PERIOD.

this price is reflected in the cost of finished housing, this value cannot vanish

the utility of a property cannot b printed out of existence

for a man to build & aquire the materials for build even a small home takes years.

therefore when a person wishes to exchange this stored work back to currency I doubt it wold be worth less in man hours.

if anything greater population = high commodity prices = higher build costs = more man hr for a given commodity exchange

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This country has a limit to the amount of jobs it has and this is linked to the size of the economy.

In previous decades as the population grew so did industry and jobs etc. to supply these people, the population is growing now yet most of the increase in goods to supply this increase are from abroad were many of our former industry's have gone,

Complete nonsense. We live in a global economy and have done for centuries. If we became more adept at servicing the global economy in innovative ways, there would be no practical limit to the number of jobs. Our former industry's [sic] failed to adapt and therefore became useless.

Germany has more immigration and less of a problem than we have.

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Complete nonsense. We live in a global economy and have done for centuries. If we became more adept at servicing the global economy in innovative ways, there would be no practical limit to the number of jobs. Our former industry's [sic] failed to adapt and therefore became useless.

Germany has more immigration and less of a problem than we have.

we have lived in a global economy for years and we were doing a lot of the manufacturing and exporting in that time.

Our former industries were mainly shipped abroad because the world opened up as much safer place to invest were labour was far cheaper than ours. even great names like Rolls Royce are opening more factories abroad.

Germanys unemployment 3million+ over 7% and these figures are disputed in their own country. No Problem

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The group, National Numeracy, says millions of people struggle to understand a payslip or a train timetable, or pay a household bill.

Government figures show almost half the working population of England have only primary school maths skills.

A government spokeswoman said poor numeracy was a national scandal.

There they go again banging on about the same old stuff that they've been banging on about for centuries (as they used to say). They know the problem but they don't do anything about it - because it's their policy.

For sure soon they'll be banging on (yet again) about there being a shortage of scientists and engineers in the UK.

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HOLA4424

There they go again banging on about the same old stuff that they've been banging on about for centuries (as they used to say). They know the problem but they don't do anything about it - because it's their policy.

For sure soon they'll be banging on (yet again) about there being a shortage of scientists and engineers in the UK.

Sure they will Mr Bong! There's always a shortage of something, from cheese to chipboard, preventing the economy from expanding like Lolo Ferrarri's bra!

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Sure they will Mr Bong! There's always a shortage of something, from cheese to chipboard, preventing the economy from expanding like Lolo Ferrarri's bra!

Indeed Mr Pin and what will they do about it - nothing apart from go into more debt. The easy way out until it isn't.

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