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Elizabeth Green’s New York Times article “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?” is funny and not so funny. In it, she recounts how, in the 1980s, A.
Alfred Taubman, owner of the A&W chain, attempted to win over customers from McDonald’s. To lure customers from McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburger, he advertised the A&W better-tasting burger that was, in contrast to the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, a full one-third pounder. One-third of a pound versus one-quarter of a pound and at the same price! Great idea, right? Well, not if you don’t know one-third is more than one-fourth!
Taubman called in his cutting-edge marketing firm, Yankelovich, Skelly & White, to find out why the A&W campaign was failing. A study had shown that,
without question, respondents preferred the taste of A&W’s burger over McDonald’s. Except for one small glitch. “Why,” respondents asked, “should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat at A&W as we do for a fourth of a pound at McDonald’s?” Since three is less than four, reasoned more than half of those questioned, A&W was really ripping them off!
And the problem is not confined to hamburger connoisseurs. Medical professionals, it turns out, aren’t immune to fallacious math either. Doctors and
nurses have also been known to err when calculating dosages for medications. The problem is prevalent enough, in fact, to support services that help simplify
math for doctors and nurses, including Broselow.com, whose tagline is “Taking the math out of medicine.
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