How bad are Americans in math? Let’s hear what netizens say...

When people who have lived in the United States mention American mathematics, what they always say is: Hey, it’s too bad. In fact, we all know that this mainly refers to ordinary people. This is certainly not the case in higher-end fields. Not to mention the top scientific research levels in various fields, among the winners of the Nobel Prize in Mathematics - the Fields Medal, Americans still have the largest number of winners.

Here, the math gap we are talking about refers to the vast difference between the mental arithmetic and oral arithmetic abilities of ordinary Americans and us Chinese. It is no exaggeration to say that in terms of oral arithmetic ability, any Chinese The old ladies selling vegetables are better than the American masters and doctors.

It’s time for a case study. Example 1: When my sister was studying, she helped an American family take care of their children in her spare time. The eldest child of that family was a teenage girl. One day, this girl asked my sister a question: What is seven plus eight? My sister opened her mouth and said: Fifteen. The girl stood up from the sofa and watched my sister jumping around. She was so excited that she shouted: "I found out you are a genius!" She fainted. My sister was indeed very smart. She was praised for her intelligence by others in China. It was a common occurrence, and I always took it calmly. But the little girl's compliment shocked her so much that she couldn't speak for a long time. According to this standard, all Chinese people are geniuses!

There is another thing that a friend told me: There was another friend who went to the store to buy things and wanted to exchange change for laundry clothes. There is a penny in the United States and Canada called Quarter, which is worth one quarter of a dollar, or 25 cents. Many public washing machines, telephones, etc. are started by inserting this kind of coin. My friend handed the cashier one yuan and asked him to exchange it for Quarter. The cashier held several Quarters in her hand and turned them upside down. For a long time, she didn't figure out how many Quarters she should give her. Finally, he made up his mind and counted out five Quarters and handed them to her!

To be honest, I didn’t believe this story when I first heard it. No matter how bad you are in math, how can you be so bad? Everyone knows that one dollar can be exchanged for four quarters, right? The friend then reported the time and place where she exchanged coins and the name of the store one by one to prove that what she said was true.

After living in the United States for a period of time, I gradually understood that one of the reasons why they would make such a joke that seemed unbelievable to us is that American schools basically do not teach children about numeracy. In terms of training, students can use calculators since elementary school. They focus on the understanding and application of mathematics, which is different from what we focus on. Another reason is that many of the people who work as cashiers have not even graduated from high school, and they themselves are disadvantaged in education. Not only are they poor in mathematics, but they are also poor in other aspects of knowledge. Also very poor. You must know that there is no need to take an exam to study in high school in the United States. As long as you attend class honestly and don't cause trouble, you can get a diploma. Anyone who wants to go to college can go to college, the only difference is what kind of college they go to.

But the story told by another friend made me overturn this conclusion. Some highly educated people are still confused about the basic concepts of mathematics.

This friend has been working on bridge design and renovation in an American company. One day, when he was reviewing his colleague’s drawings, he found that the calculation of an angle was wrong, so he corrected it and told his colleagues.

The young man was a newly recruited engineer from the company and had just received his master's degree in engineering.

After a while, the young man came over with the drawing and asked him: How did you calculate the data you changed? The friend said: "It's very simple. The sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to 180 degrees. If you subtract this number from 180 degrees, you will get the correct angle."

He nodded and stood there thinking about it.

Then, he asked a thundering question: "Do you think the sum of the interior angles of all triangles is equal to 180 degrees?"

My friend asked me on the spot after hearing this. Fainting...

From NetEase

Americans are very poor at mathematics.

However, it is not that simple to answer this question carefully. First, there are still Asians in the United States. In fact, Asians are pretty good at math, especially those who came to the United States in high school. Second, in the United States, people with certain majors such as engineering, computer science, or mathematics are quite good at mathematics, but they are only a minority after all.

Considering the above two reasons, the answer to this question can be summarized as most whites and blacks who have received American education since childhood in the United States are very poor in mathematics.

I have been in contact with Asians, or ABC (American born Chinese), who have lived in the United States since I was a child, but I have not had close friendship with them. Maybe there are not many second-generation immigrants like me, so I don’t know. It’s tempting to speculate, but Americans have always had one long-standing first impression of Asians: they are good at math. Therefore, maybe Asians who have received American education since childhood are better at math than other Americans, but I have no first-hand information.

Now let’s talk about the students in my class. My graduate major is big data analysis, which should be similar to domestic management information systems. 1/3 are white people (1/5 of which are Hispanics), 1/3 are Indians, and 1/3 are East Asians (one Japanese (one father is Korean, the mother is white, and the others are Chinese). Unfortunately, there is not a single black person, and it seems that our business graduate students do not have any black people.

Because we have to do projects together throughout the semester, we were divided into groups at the beginning of the semester, with 5 people in each group. The school took great pains to ensure that each group must include at least one person from the above three ethnic groups. . My team members include three American buddies, Cody, Jorge, and Dave, and an Indian buddy, Raj (there are at least three Indian buddies in our major with Raj in their names).

It all starts with a course we took last semester, called data mining. The Chinese name seems to be data mining. The professor is Taiwanese. In fact, I had 6 teachers throughout the semester, 3 of whom were Chinese. This course is indeed difficult. It teaches a lot about matrices, vectors, algorithms, and data flow operations. Since my major in China is economics, I have no foundation in this area. I have forgotten all the advanced mathematics in my freshman year. Still spent a lot of time on this class.

This course requires very high levels of logical thinking and, to put it bluntly, mathematics. The midterm exam was extremely difficult. I spent half an hour on each of the three difficult questions (of course, I felt that if I still had the computing power of my senior year in high school, 10 minutes on each question would be enough).

The result of the exam was that I got full marks. When the group was doing the project in the afternoon, my friends were all shocked when they found out that I got full marks. Later I found out that 64 people in this major got one *** three perfect marks, including Yuya-kun (the Japanese), Helen (the Filipino dad). Mom (white) and I, two and a half Asian. Dave asked me, how do you know how to do it? I said it was in the book, but he said, why the hell couldn’t I find it?

Then I taught him, but later I found out that he couldn’t even convert decimal to binary, let alone Cody, who had never heard of it. children. Luckily for Dave, he is one of the more powerful white people in our class and has a bright mind. I taught him about 10 minutes and explained the general idea and he understood it.

However, it took 20 minutes to teach Cody binary, but he still didn’t understand it. From then on, at Jorge's strong request, every group project time would start with a period of "Teacher Pan will give you a small stove." I explained how to do data mining homework on the whiteboard to my friends, and everyone listened very well. serious. Not to mention Cody, every time I did homework from now on, either I would go to his house or he would come to my house and talk for an hour or two. One time, what he talked about was too difficult, and he just gave up and left.

I have a very good relationship with Cody. I even invited him to my house to have hot pot (a base brought from China). He always invited me to go to parties at his house (adventures at parties will be discussed in future chapters). (mentioned), I also gave him a Chinese name "Dimeng". I told him that the pronunciation is diamond, and as the name suggests, he is really silly and cute.

In the blink of an eye, it was the end of the semester. The day before the data mining test, everyone had a headache. In fact, I had already finished reviewing it at that time. At everyone's strong request, I went to the school to give you a pre-exam surprise. My life principles have always been to "cultivate oneself, manage the family, govern the country, and bring peace to the world." Although the first step has not been completed, I still have to help my brothers occasionally.

I taught from 2 pm to 10 pm, and then I realized how painful it is to discuss things related to mathematics with Americans. Of course, I also had the mentality of consolidating knowledge.

I was basically explaining the whole time, and Raj would also help write down the steps. I would write each step of the operation in detail on the whiteboard. Some logical algorithms that I thought were very simple were taught in class. I will explain two more. Three times will do.

When Jorge asked me how I got Y+aY=(1+a)Y, I was speechless. What's even more speechless is that I taught Cody two hours to teach him how to solve the quadratic equation on his own. I wrote the root formula for him. The key thing is that he didn't know which ones are a, b, c and how to substitute them. For example, 2x^2+bx+c=0, how to calculate it using the root formula.

Let’s talk about something more retarded, calculating 63*5. Cody subconsciously went to get the calculator, but I stopped him. He looked at it for 30 seconds and wrote down 153. I erased it. Another difficult one. Once I went to teach him homework, 78+56, and I wrote out the answer directly. He was shocked after reading it, and his jaw really felt like it was about to drop.

When I told him that China’s SAT (SAT is the college entrance examination in the United States) math test does not allow the use of calculators, and I found a fill-in-the-blank question (question 8 or 9) from the 2014 Jiangsu College Entrance Examination and translated it into English I showed him that after calculating half of the whiteboard and calculating the answer, I felt that his worldview had collapsed.

I had better luck in the final exam, and I got full marks again. Since I got full marks on midterm, final, and normal assignments, I was the only one, so my final grade was naturally A+. I still have to be proud of this.

The story is not over yet. On the third day after the exam, Cody suddenly called me and asked me if I would like to help his brother Casey with math tutoring. He also said that he would pay me. I know his brother, and Cody invited me to his house for Thanksgiving, and we had a lot of fun. It was the first time I saw a rich man in the United States. The backyard of Cody's house was bigger than our entire house. It felt so cool.

It turns out that Cody’s father is the dean of our school’s journalism school. This is called hiding. It turns out that the rich man is around. I met his younger brother, Casey, on Thanksgiving Day. He was a nice guy, and there was nothing much to do during the winter vacation, so I agreed and agreed to help him with pre-calculus, which is the basic knowledge before taking calculus.

Because I am also average in mathematics, I know that I am far behind my classmates who took the postgraduate entrance exams. I was asked to do half of the domestic postgraduate entrance exams in mathematics and I couldn’t even understand the questions, such as non-homogeneous linear equations and Lagrang. Sun theorem and compound derivation have become legends in my mind. In order not to make a fool of myself, I reviewed it myself, thinking that this pre-calculus should be similar to the first chapter of the National People's Congress version of Advanced Mathematics, which talks about the basic properties of functions.

I started teaching Casey, and I was shocked. I looked at the sample questions they gave for the final exam. They were all multiple-choice questions, with a total of three knowledge points: finding the extreme value of a quadratic function, and the concept of rate of change ( Ask you 20, 40, 65, 95, is the rate of increase increasing or decreasing), the basis of the exponential function (really the basis, such as the principal of 1,000 dollars, the bank's annual interest rate is 5%, and the interest at the end of each year is converted to the next Annual principal, find the sum of principal and interest in the fifth year). It is really the content of domestic junior high schools, at most the first year of high school. As someone who suffered the torture of Ge Jun in the Jiangsu College Entrance Examination in 2010, I really laughed.

So I taught him patiently, thinking about how my teacher taught me in the past, and I also set up questions for him to do, and told him how to draw a picture to see the opening direction of a quadratic function. One *** two afternoons, about 7 hours, Cody actually gave me 280 dollars, I was a little embarrassed. The most ridiculous thing is that after Christmas, Cody suddenly told me the great news that Casey ranked first in the class in math, and the whole family was very happy.

I laughed my head off because before I started teaching Casey, I received a text message from his mother, saying that it was too much trouble for me. Casey had been dropped a lot in this class. So, naturally, Casey came to me for tutoring again this semester. I taught him once a few days ago. In the last semester of high school, he finally learned about imaginary numbers at the beginning of school. After flipping through his textbook, he found that there were conic sections such as ellipses in the back.

I already feel a wave of dollars approaching.

From Zhike.com