03-09-2020, 01:55 PM
Even back in the 1970s, multiple choice papers were marked by machine.
I was at school in the days when calcuators were non-existant or (in the 6th form) rare. A lot of science and applied maths questions were designed so that the numbers wre easy to work out in your head or with pencil and paper. So you knew you had the right answer if everythng worked nicely. Though they threw in the odd one that wasn't like that. In applied maths A level most of our textbooks were imperial units but the exams were metric. We were bright enough to take that in our stride but it was good fun seeing where things divided by 12/14/16/20 etc to get the answer. Wonderful units like the poundal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundal
When you've done any work using imperial units, or even CGS (abamps and statvolts anyone?) , you realise just how well SI units are designed.
I was at school in the days when calcuators were non-existant or (in the 6th form) rare. A lot of science and applied maths questions were designed so that the numbers wre easy to work out in your head or with pencil and paper. So you knew you had the right answer if everythng worked nicely. Though they threw in the odd one that wasn't like that. In applied maths A level most of our textbooks were imperial units but the exams were metric. We were bright enough to take that in our stride but it was good fun seeing where things divided by 12/14/16/20 etc to get the answer. Wonderful units like the poundal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundal
When you've done any work using imperial units, or even CGS (abamps and statvolts anyone?) , you realise just how well SI units are designed.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
