Article: Matric pass rate improved in 2012

porchrat said:
Firstly it is a Faculty of Science, not a Department of Science and secondly a lot of the so called "soft sciences" in the Biology track side of science don't need maths and if they do will only require it in the first year.

Having a tertiary education in the sciences you should be aware of this.
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my bad. department of maths, faculty of science. :o

"maths" is also require for biology. it is not as heavy weight as the other subjects do.
what I mean "maths" is mathematical skills, not a subject.
 
DreamKing said:
my bad. department of maths, faculty of science. :o
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Geez if you have an Msc in Mathematics then of course your maths is good.


"maths" is also require for biology. it is not as heavy weight as the other subjects do.
what I mean "maths" is mathematical skills, not a subject.
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You don't need maths for biology even as a set of skills. You need some for chemistry and biochemistry I will give you that but you can get away without it in biology IMO. You maybe need some basic arithmetic for biology but full on maths with calculus and whatnot is a total waste.
 
JungleBoy said:
The fact is many learners left matric without any Maths at all. They neither took HG or SG. I have said before that Maths was not compulsory (at least not when I was at school). Maths Literacy is NOT a substitute for Standard Grade Maths, in fact it is meant for those that would have avoided Maths altogether.
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But there is no more standard grade maths, is there? Maths literacy replaced that, to the detriment of the people who need something easier than higher grade, but not quite as trivial as maths literacy.

Maths is not a compulsory subject after Gr. 10 as I understand it. Up until then, it is. The questions I saw in that maths literacy exam was primary school mathematics, never mind Gr. 10. So is maths literacy then basically just a subject learners can take if they somehow failed to do the basics all throughout primary school, and the start of high school?
 
The one thing about modern examinations of mathematics is that you can get 50% by just getting your work correct. The claim that kids just don't have the aptitude for it is nonsense imho. half of it is simply studying properly. The rest is aptitude, and you'd have to have zero aptitude to get any further, which is also ludicrous. With a pass-mark of 30-odd percent, failing it is inexcusable...
 
Sinbad said:
Sorry, disagree strongly.

With maths lit you at least know how to do basic stuff like working out areas, percentages, etc...
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You have a point there. I'd argue though that it and more is covered in primary school already.

Fix the problem at the primary school level instead of introducing a subject the purpose of which is simply to rehash the same stuff these kids should have picked up in primary school.
 
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Sinbad said:
Sorry, disagree strongly.

With maths lit you at least know how to do basic stuff like working out areas, percentages, etc...
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That's the kind of stuff you learn in Standard 6 and even primary school. Maths lit rewards kids for being lazy fsckers leading up to matric...
 
porchrat said:
Geez if you have an Msc in Mathematics then of course your maths is good.



You don't need maths for biology even as a set of skills. You need some for chemistry and biochemistry I will give you that but you can get away without it in biology IMO. You maybe need some basic arithmetic for biology but full on maths with calculus and whatnot is a total waste.
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so I assume that you don't understand what is calculus very well.

the "calculus" you study in your high school level is very basic. basically, calculus is touching your daily life but you never know that.

for example, do you know what is x-t graph? it always appears in your biology textbook. it is "one dimensional graph".

after integral of the function x-t, do you know what's that means?
 
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DreamKing said:
so I assume that you don't understand what is calculus very well.

the "calculus" you study in your high school level is very basic. basically, calculus is touching your daily life but you never know that.

for example, do you know what is x-t graph? it always appears in your biology textbook. it is "one dimensional graph".

after integral of the function x-t, do you know what's that means?
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Nope no clue. I'm sure I did at some point because I had to take maths but I haven't had to use it in much to do with the soft sciences since. Sure you use some logarithms and you do some basic stats work but beyond that maths is a waste in many cases, certainly in a lot of biology. That I haven't had to retain this stuff serves to demonstrate my point actually.

I've never heard of a one dimensional graph. Doesn't seem particularly useful. Why measure something without making it relative to something else. If it is x-y then it has 2 dimensions. At least that makes sense to me. Then you can introduce a 3rd dimension relative to the other 2 and again that makes sense... 1 dimension seems to me to not be very useful though.
 
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porchrat said:
Nope no clue. I'm sure I did at some point because I had to take maths but I haven't had to use it in much to do with the soft sciences since. Sure you use some logarithms and you do some basic stats work but beyond that maths is a waste in many cases, certainly in a lot of biology. That I haven't had to retain this stuff serves to demonstrate my point actually.

I've never heard of a one dimensional graph. Doesn't seem particularly useful. Why measure something without making it relative to something else. If it is x-y then it has 2 dimensions. At least that makes sense to me. Then you can introduce a 3rd dimension relative to the other 2 and again that makes sense... 1 dimension seems to me to not be very useful though.
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sure, as I know doctors today put all the data to the machine to generate the result they want. they are not doing any calculation now. :D
 
DreamKing said:
sure, as I know doctors today put all the data to the machine to generate the result they want. they are not doing any calculation now. :D
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What machines that generate the results they want?... you mean blood tests and such? Blood counts and such are simple arithmetic, not complex mathematics.

That and doctors don't even use the machines, they pay an outside laboratory employing medical scientists and those medical scientists use the machines and then give the doctor the results in a report. The report even comes with a range of acceptable values for normal human beings and an indicator colour as to which numbers are out of that range.

Fact is machines do it more accurately and more quickly. Humans used to sit with these grid things they placed over microscope slides and then manually counted each blood cell in a particular square and then inferred onto the whole blood system from that square. Prone to error and inefficient. Less to do with poor maths skills and more to do with humans being ill suited to boring repetitive tasks.

That and some processes today simply cannot be done by humans, they require far too fine a control of temperature in precise cycles and an enclosed environment free from contaminants for a human to do it.

Even the mixing of chemicals into the correct ratios is simple arithmetic, not complex mathematics. Sure you need to understand concepts like the mol but once you have wrapped your head around that the math involved is elementary.

Also I still don't see how a 1 dimensional graph could be of any use. Granted my maths knowledge is not the best but it seems like a data point with only 1 value relative to nothing else would be worthless.
 
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Dylan_G said:
It is. "Slot" 1 is maths or maths lit. Didn't you read my other post in this thread ? link
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No, I didn't. Guess I should have. Anyway, am I correct in assuming that maths lit is a basically a subject that re-teaches things you should have done earlier in maths? As I said, the stuff in that maths lit exam is primary school, or maybe early high school stuff. By losing SG, more students are negatively affected who could potentially have changed their minds about their career choice. Maths will be worth little to tertiary institutions, while SG seemed a little more challenging, and learners had the option to move up to HG if they did well enough.
 
porchrat said:
Also I still don't see how a 1 dimensional graph could be of any use. Granted my maths knowledge is not the best but it seems like a data point with only 1 value relative to nothing else would be worthless.
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you use it to compare how long things are or to represent quantities.
 
Nicodeamus said:
you use it to compare how long things are or to represent quantities.
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OK that makes sense.

Thanks for that :)

I don't suppose you have a link to how one would go about representing something like that. The graph must look funky.
 
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DreamKing said:
1-D vs time. it is not 1 value.
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/1DKin/U1L4e.cfm
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Oh when you said v-t you meant a velocity/time graph. I thought those were some fancy mathematics symbols for concepts I wasn't aware of. That isn't mathematics as a subject that is physics and simple physics at that (even I know it :p).

Then it is 2 dimensional not one dimensional if it is over time. It is velocity as one dimension and time as the other. That is one dimensional kinematics but that doesn't mean the graph is one dimensional it has to do with the nature of the motion being studied.

I don't claim to be some sort of maths genius but even I know that.

I'm talking about 1 and only 1 value per data point. The minute you introduce time you have introduced a second dimension. I'm talking about stuff like just velocity in absence of time. Luckily Nicodeamus gave me an example of how a 1 dimensional graph could be used.

Still you don't need to use v-t graphs in a lot of fields in Biology.
 
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Nicodeamus said:
you use it to compare how long things are or to represent quantities.
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Maybe I'm just being obtuse here, but how on earth does one plot a chart/graph in one dimension. Physically, I cannot imagine how one could possibly sequence something visually on a single axis. Or am I not quite understanding what you mean?
 
A number line is a one dimensional graph.
 
DJ... said:
Maybe I'm just being obtuse here, but how on earth does one plot a chart/graph in one dimension. Physically, I cannot imagine how one could possibly sequence something visually on a single axis. Or am I not quite understanding what you mean?
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you draw lines ontop of each other. The length represents the magnitude, the longest one is the biggest. That is all that you can use it for.

------------------ 1m
----------------------------------------------2m

draw these two ontop of each other. (in different colours)

1m is longer than 2m, now you can substitute m for any quantity.
 
That would be 2D with colour being the 2nd dimension.
 
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