Although word trickery can make people misunderstand basic math, I have discovered to my surprise and horror that a very large amount of society simply can't do basic math even as adults. Anyone with an arts or humanities background (and that it probably the majority of the population including lawyers and journalists), and that doesn't use math every day, is shockingly bad at even the basics, and I MEAN basics. To the numerate (and my background is business/engineering) basic math is trivial, can be done in your head and is as second nature as breathing, even understanding the meaning of ratios is beyond an amazingly large amount of supposedly educated adults.
As Mark Twain remarked -- there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics . Most of the media traffic in all three .
Yep
Be afraid of the innumerate math zombies. They don’t die. They proliferate.
Although word trickery can make people misunderstand basic math, I have discovered to my surprise and horror that a very large amount of society simply can't do basic math even as adults. Anyone with an arts or humanities background (and that it probably the majority of the population including lawyers and journalists), and that doesn't use math every day, is shockingly bad at even the basics, and I MEAN basics. To the numerate (and my background is business/engineering) basic math is trivial, can be done in your head and is as second nature as breathing, even understanding the meaning of ratios is beyond an amazingly large amount of supposedly educated adults.