Many of the traditional news channels are utilizing a broad variety of channels to distribute news telegrams. I almost always find the funny one on teletext and they are hard work to get repeated here, but today I found on in the RSS feed from DR, the old monopoly TV/Radio station and news source in Denmark.
The two interesting stories got published at the same time. A fast translation of the topic by me:
“Every 8th. student has problems in elementary school” and “Every 7th. student has problems in elementary school”.
And the same text from both telegrams:
“Den største undersøgelse nogensinde af elever og læreres opfattelse af folkeskolen viser, at op imod 15 procent af eleverne har problemer – hovedsageligt drenge.”
Ok, I will not translate that, but you can dig the figure 15% without any knowledge of Danish.
So if we set up the numbers:
1/8 = 1 * 100 / 8 = 12,5%
1/7 = 1* 100 / 7 = 14.285714286%
According to the journalist behind the telegrams, the percentage is 15. First telegram is clearly closer than the second, but using ordinary rounding rules I only get 14% for 1/7.
Don’t trust anything you read in the newspaper or on the Internet. Actually you should not trust anything in this blog entry, do your own translations and calculations.
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