What fresh hell is this maths GCSE question?

[Lex345]

Please can someone help? We have textbooks for the GCSE syllabus, teacher has not been helpful explaining this to my daughter- I don't remember this from school either-

Work out an estimate for the value of

√63.5 <->0.17

The exam paper will show it correctly though so she doesn't need to worry about that.

She should ask the teacher to explain if she's not sure how to approach that type of question

It's Q8 and Q9 - so in a GCSE Higher, these shouldn't be too challenging for someone aiming for 8 or 9.

So it's the teacher's error.

I would love to be a fly on the wall when the teacher tries to answer the question you posed at the start.

If you go to that same site I linked the paper from, you can see the full paper, answers, mark scheme and video walk through, to help with the rest of the questions. You could also read the examiner report for the exam and look at the grade boundaries, and that will tell you if it was a particularly hard exam, which questions students struggled with, etc. Examiner reports are often quite interesting!

https://www.mathsgenie.co.uk/papers.html

He's not the only one!

I did add maths at school - many moons ago - and am finding ancient Sanskrit easier.

This is what ChatGPT thought:
To estimate the value of √63.5, you can round 63.5 to a more manageable number and then take the square root.

Let's round 63.5 to 64, which is a perfect square, and then find the square root of 64:

√64 = 8

So, √63.5 is approximately 8.

The "<-> 0.17" part seems to be indicating an uncertainty or error margin of 0.17. This means that the value of √63.5 is approximately 8, with an error margin of ±0.17. This means the estimated value could be between 7.83 and 8.17.

RTFT folks, the question was mistyped.

Chat GPT needs to ask why a question would want an error interval of plus or minus 0.17

Going to chip in here.
get your daughter to write down where and why she’s stuck…explain her reasoning
then she takes to her teacher
And asks her teacher where she going wrong and teacher can see her reasoning so far and help her

i got a “u” grade at A level maths because I relied on others trying to solve my homework when I was stuck. I re-sat my A level and got an A grade. Serious shit. The difference was I was resitting with a private tutor and no one else around to help me with my homework. She made me write down my thinking whenever I got stuck or thought I got wrong, and within WEEKS (with just 4 hours per week) all the pennies dropped and I sailed through my exam. Never sat exams agian like that where I walked out knowing I had made one stupid error but not enough time to figure out where.

that lesson learnt, that I needed to note down where I got stuck then speak to the professional tutor about it, stayed with me into university. I got a 2.1 based on sheer slog and always using my tutors to teach me , not my mates, my parents, or the swotty student who fancied me

I also found out at university, that when I stuck my hand up in lectures to ask for clarification I was met with other students murmuring, “I don’t get it either”. I learnt there is never a dumb question, if it’s a genuine lack of understanding. (I did chemistry at uni) .

That was over 40 years ago. I never forgot that lesson. I became a tutor of adults as part of my job, I always said if you get stuck come back to ME, not your colleagues, wirte down where you get to and your thinking so we can together “unravel” your mind and get you thinking in the way to solve it for you. as a teacher you know you will never teach anything in a way everyone will understand.

Your daughters big lesson you CAN teach her is to build confidence that she isn’t stupid in asking her teacher for the explanation on how to solve it, and she isn’t a nuisance, or teachers swot, and that by indicating on the question exactly what bit she is stuck on it’ll help her teacher to “get inside her head” with where her taking is getting stuck.

you are, frankly, doing her few favours trying to solve her problems for her😢 unless you are a maths teacher too. 😉

Nonetheless, in this particular case, the OP has in fact done her daughter quite a big favour in asking for outside help, as they have discovered that the unsolvable problem was in fact a printer error/typo, and all the working out or talking through in the world was never going to help her find the answer. Once she had seen the correct question, she was relieved and regained confidence.

Thank you for the advice, however when my daughter has tried to ask for help she has been told to work it out on her own (and in this case, since it is a complete mistype, she had little hope of understanding it) and I am not doing her work for her-she has already sat her mock exam and we regularly do go through things together after tests-maths and other subjects- because she finds it helpful. 1:1 support is not forthcoming at her school.

I sometimes help her revise, too, when I have time to (like languages, memorising words etc) I think most parents would do the same.

There is a very good reason we have forked out on exam board text books for multiple subjects to support her learning.

I’d argue OP is doing the role of a private tutor here. Going through an exam and understanding the reasoning. OP seems relatively mathematical and is putting in the hours with the exam syllabus/past papers/revision guides that teach technique.

I went to a good school with a poor English department that discouraged questioning and said things like: if you don’t understand you don’t belong in this set. This was set 3 of 9. I owe my English score increasing to the friend’s mum who taught her son how to structure essays logically and literary analysis techniques another friend’s mum (who had a phd in English) teaching her daughter. The son and daughter spread the knowledge around our friend group and gave their own feedback on our work. (I never had anything direct from the mum’s.) I did the hours at home but went from mock C to an A1 at Higher.

I had no problem with sciences from textbook only so was able to help out there even though my parents lacked the background to help.

(Yes, we were all insufferable nerds who revised at lunch.)