Group items tagged

Mmmm we could have a field day with the stats in this article!

Great resoruces. Maybe we can change it for South African cricket scores?

Mathematics is used in interesting, and often less than accurate, ways. Newspapers present graphs showing apparently correlated variables, but with a little thought, some of the time you will find that whilst it looks like two variables are connected, there is actually no cause and effect. Sometimes this is because there is a third factor causing the movements in the variables - for example, if it is hot and sunny, sales of sunscreen lotion increase, as do sales of air-conditioners. If you plot these sales against each other, you find a correlation. However, they are only connected because of a third variable, the summer weather. Of course, an unscrupulous media can draw connections where they don't exist for more political ends, such as blaming an increase in crime on the sales of hooded sweatshirts. And politicians have been known to confuse cause and effect, thinking that a local crime increase is due to the increased police presence, rather than the other way around.

In this unit students develop a variety of mathematical skills including: * Data collection and organisation, using a questionnaire about grocery stores, brand names and cell-phones.* Graphical representation of the data collected using bar graphs and pie charts.* Understanding cumulative data, as well as developing and interpreting frequency tables. * Analysis of data to answer questions, using graphs and tables.* Reading and interpreting fi gures, in the context of a newspaper report concerning skills development. * Calculating the various measures of central tendency and percentages in the context of workers and wages.* Working with range and spread of data.* Identifying distortion and manipulation of information.* Identifying patterns and trends,  through working with scatterplots and broken line graphs.* Making simple predictions and comparisons.

Another article slamming Mathslit

This studymate leaflet (free with local newspapers) have: - 10 things to help learners succeed in the exams -Diet and academic perfomance (BMI-maths lit) - Tops for teachers, learners and old toppies (that's us)