Here, we mean that the average American is far from China in mental arithmetic and language ability. It is no exaggeration to say that any old lady who sells vegetables in China is better than an American master or doctor in language ability.
Here's the situation. Example 1: When my sister was studying, she used her spare time to help an American family take care of their children. The oldest child in that family is a teenage girl. One day, the girl asked my sister a question: What is seven plus eight? My sister came as soon as she opened her mouth: fifteen. The beautiful girl got up from the sofa and looked at my sister skipping. She shouted excitedly, "I find you are a genius!" " "Faint, my sister is so smart. It is common to be praised as smart in China, and she has been very calm after listening to it. But the little girl's praise shocked her for a long time. According to this standard, we are all geniuses in China!
Another thing was told by a friend: another friend remembered to change money for washing clothes after shopping in the store. In the United States and Canada, there is a kind of penny called Quarter, which is a quarter of a dollar, or 25 cents. Many public washing machines, such as telephones, are started by inserting this coin. A friend handed the cashier a dollar and said, please change it into quarters. The cashier has some quarters in her hand and turns them upside down. She wondered for a long time how many quarters to give her. Finally, I made up my mind, counted five quarters and handed them to her!
To tell the truth, I just heard this story, and I don't believe it at all. How bad can math be? Do you know how to change this dollar into four quarters? My friend reported the time, place and store name of her money exchange, which proved that what she said was true.
Later, after living in the United States for a period of time, I gradually understood that one of the reasons why they played such ridiculous jokes in our view was that American schools basically did not cultivate children's computing ability. Students can use calculators from primary school. They focus on the understanding and application of mathematics, which is different from what we pay attention to. Another reason is that many cashiers don't even graduate from high school, so they owe them something in education. They are not only poor in mathematics, but also poor in other aspects of knowledge. You know, there are no exams in American high schools. As long as you attend classes honestly and stay out of trouble, you can get your diploma. Anyone who wants to go to college can go to it. The only difference is what kind of college he goes to.
But the story told by another friend made me overturn my conclusion. Some people with higher education are still confused about the basic concepts of mathematics.
This friend has been engaged in bridge design and reconstruction in an American company. One day, when he was reviewing his colleagues' drawings, he found that there was an angle calculation error, so he corrected it and told his colleagues.
The young man is a newly recruited engineer in the company and has just got a master's degree in engineering.
After a while, the young man came to him with a drawing and asked him: How did you work out this data? The friend said, "It's very simple. The sum of the internal angles of a triangle is equal to 180 degrees. 180 degrees MINUS this number can get the correct angle. "
He nodded and stood wondering.
Then, he asked a question: "You said that the sum of the internal angles of all triangles is equal to 180 degrees?"
My friend will faint on the spot. ...
From Netease
Americans are poor at math.
However, it is not so simple to answer this question carefully. First, there are Asians in America. In fact, Asians are very good at math, especially those who came to the United States in high school. Second, in the United States, some professional people, such as engineering, computer or mathematics, are also good at mathematics, but after all, they are a minority. Considering the above two reasons, the answer to this question can be summarized as follows: in the United States, whites and blacks who have received American education since childhood are mostly poor in mathematics.
I have come into contact with Asians who have lived in the United States since childhood, or ABC (American-born China), but I don't have a deep friendship. Perhaps there are not many second-generation immigrants like me, so it is hard to guess, but Americans have always had a long-standing first impression of Asians: they are good at math. So, maybe Asians who received American education from childhood are better at math than other Americans, but I don't have first-hand information.
Tell me about my classmates. My postgraduate major is big data analysis, which should be similar to the domestic management information system. White 1/3 (including Hispanic 1/5), Indian 1/3, East Asian 1/3 (a Japanese, a Korean whose parents are white, and the rest are from China).
Because we have to do projects together throughout the semester, at the beginning of the semester, we were divided into five groups, and the school took great pains. Each of the above three ethnic groups must include at least one person. My team consists of three American buddies, Cody, George and Dave, and an Indian buddy Raj (at least three Indian buddies in our major have Raj in their names).
Things have to start from a class we had last semester. The name is data mining, and the Chinese name seems to be data mining. This professor is from Taiwan Province Province. In fact, I have six teachers throughout the semester, three of whom are from China. This course is really difficult, and a lot of it is about matrix, vector, algorithm and data flow operation. Because I majored in economics in China, I didn't have a foundation in this field, and I forgot the high number when I was a freshman, so I still spent a lot of time on this course.
This course has high requirements for logical thinking, that is, for mathematics. The mid-term exam was extremely difficult, and it took me half an hour to work out three difficult problems (of course, I think that if I still have the calculation ability of senior three, each problem will take 10 minutes).
The result of the exam was that I got full marks. When the group was working on the project in the afternoon, my friends were shocked to learn that I got full marks. Later, I learned that there are 64 people in this major, with three full marks, namely You Yejun (Japanese), Helen (my father, Filipino mother, white) and me, two and a half Asians. Dave asked me, how do you know how to do it? I said it was in the book, and he said, why the fuck didn't I find it?
Then I taught him, only to find out later that he can't even convert decimal into binary, let alone Cody, who has never heard of it. What are you studying? Note that we are all children who graduated from undergraduate courses. Dave is ok. He is a good white man in our class and has a bright brain. I taught him about 10 minutes to explain the main idea, and he understood.
But I taught Cody binary for 20 minutes, and he still didn't understand. Since then, at Jorge's strong request, there will be "Teacher Pan will give you a small stove" before each group project. I will explain to my friends how to do data mining homework on the whiteboard, and everyone will listen carefully. Not to mention Cody. Either I go to his house or he comes to my house to talk for an hour or two. Once the lecture was too difficult, he gave up and left.
I have a good relationship with Cody and invited him to my house to eat hot pot (the bottom material brought in China). He always invites me to his house at parties (the adventures at parties will be mentioned in later chapters), and I also give him a Chinese name "Dai Meng". I told him that the pronunciation is diamond, as the name implies, and he is really dull and cute.
It's the end of the semester in a blink of an eye, and the day before the data mining exam, everyone has a headache. Actually, I had reviewed it at that time. At everyone's strong request, I went to school to surprise everyone before the exam. My code of conduct has always been "cultivate one's morality, keep the family in order, govern the country and level the world". Although the first step has not yet been completed, I have to help my brothers occasionally.
From 2 pm to 10 pm, I don't know how painful it is to discuss math-related things with Americans. Of course, I also hold the mentality of consolidating knowledge. Basically, I explain the whole process, and Raj will help me write down the steps. I will write down every operation in detail on the whiteboard. I think some logic algorithms are very simple, and I have to explain them two or three times.
When Jorge asked me how to get Y+aY=( 1+a)Y, I was speechless at once. What's more, I taught Cody for two hours before I taught him to solve a quadratic equation with one variable, and the roots were all written for him. The key people don't know which one is A, B and C, and how to substitute it. For example, 2x 2+bx+c = 0, how to use the root formula?
Say something more retarded. It's 63*5. Cody subconsciously went to get the calculator, but I stopped him. He looked at it for 30 seconds and wrote 153. Damn it. Another difficulty, I once taught him homework, 78+56, and I wrote the answer directly. After reading it, he was shocked. It's really the feeling that your chin is about to fall off.
When I told him that calculators were not allowed in China's SAT (National College Entrance Examination in the United States) math test, I found a 20 14 Jiangsu college entrance examination fill-in-the-blank question (No.8 or No.9) and translated it into English for him. After working out the answer with half a whiteboard, I felt that his worldview had collapsed.
I was lucky enough to get full marks in the final exam. Because the mid-term, final and usual homework are full marks, I am the only one, and the final score is naturally A+, so I need to be complacent.
The story is not over yet. On the third day after the exam, Cody suddenly called and asked me if I would help his brother Kathy with her math, and said he would pay me. I know his brother, and Cody invited me to his house for Thanksgiving, and had a great time. The first time I saw a local tyrant in America, Cody's backyard was bigger than our whole house, and it felt so cool.
It turns out that Cody's father is the dean of the School of Journalism in our school. This TM is hidden. It turns out that local tyrants are around. I met his brother Kathy on Thanksgiving Day, and he was very nice. Just a few days before the winter vacation, I was free, so I agreed to help him make up the basic knowledge before calculus and calculus.
Because I'm not good at math, I know I'm far behind the students who took the postgraduate entrance examination. I don't even understand half of the questions in my domestic postgraduate entrance examination mathematics. What non-homogeneous linear equations, Lagrange theorem, compound derivatives have become legends in my mind. In order not to make a fool of myself, I also reviewed it myself. I think that before calculus, it should be similar to the first chapter of advanced mathematics in NPC edition, which is about the basic properties of functions.
I started teaching Kathy, and I was surprised. In the final exam, I saw the examples they gave me, all of which were multiple-choice questions, three knowledge points, the concept of finding the extreme value of quadratic function, the rate of change (ask you 20, 40, 65, 95, whether the rate of increase or decrease), and the basis of exponential function (really the basis, such as principal 1000 yuan, bank). It's really the content of junior high schools in China, and at most it's a senior one. As a 20 10 Jiangsu college entrance examination was destroyed by Ge Jun, I really laughed.
So I taught him patiently, thinking about how the teacher taught me before, giving him a problem to do and telling him how to draw a picture to see the opening direction of the quadratic function. One * * * two afternoons, about seven hours, Cody actually gave me 280 yuan, and I was a little embarrassed. The bloodiest thing is that after Christmas, Cody suddenly told me a great piece of good news. Kathy won the math exam in class, and the whole family was very happy.
I laughed and peed, because I received a short message from his mother before I taught Kathy, saying that it had caused me trouble, and Kathy had been left behind a lot in this class. So, naturally, Kathy asked me for advice again this semester. He just taught once the other day. In the last semester of high school, he finally learned imaginary numbers at the beginning of school. He flipped through the textbook and found that there were conic curves such as ellipses at the back.
I already feel a big wave of dollars approaching.
From Zhike. com