“Sad, but true.”
Have you gotten the email that begins, “Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58…”? It goes on to recount the difficulty the clerk had making change for $2.08, then explains this difficulty with a humorous list of word problems through the decades that shows, supposedly, just what a wretched state of affairs teaching math is in. I’ve gotten this email countless times and feel sure it must be apocryphal.
But the following story, I assure you, is true. My sister, who lives in Tennessee, recently went to a local restaurant to buy an iced tea to go. She ordered the tea 1/3 sweet, and the rest unsweet. (For you non-Southerners, many restuarants in the South give you a choice of sweetened or unsweetened iced tea. Year round, to boot.) She then heard the clerk turn to the microphone and say, “Tea, 1/3 sweet, and 1/2 plain.”
Yikes! Call the fractions police!
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