About ten years ago I went into a fabric store to buy some felt for the brake pads on a tape recorder that I was working on. There were three teenaged girls in front of me in the checkout line who wanted to buy some 1/3 inch thick foam padding. The clerk said that they didn’t have 1/3 inch foam, they only had 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch and one inch foam. The girls decided that one inch was what they wanted. They obviously had absolutely NO idea where 1/3 fit into that numeric series!! At this point I explained to them that “No, 1/3 inch was numerically closest to the 1/4 inch foam but they might want to buy the half inch foam to get better padding than the quarter inch foam would provide.” The girls looked at me like I must be one of those ICKY math teachers that just arrived from Mars and left without buying anything.
JanCinVV,
About ten years ago I went into a fabric store to buy some felt for the brake pads on a tape recorder that I was working on. There were three teenaged girls in front of me in the checkout line who wanted to buy some 1/3 inch thick foam padding. The clerk said that they didn’t have 1/3 inch foam, they only had 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch and one inch foam. The girls decided that one inch was what they wanted. They obviously had absolutely NO idea where 1/3 fit into that numeric series!! At this point I explained to them that “No, 1/3 inch was numerically closest to the 1/4 inch foam but they might want to buy the half inch foam to get better padding than the quarter inch foam would provide.” The girls looked at me like I must be one of those ICKY math teachers that just arrived from Mars and left without buying anything.