The students in Southwestern China were faced with intriguing questions in maths dealing with sheeps, goats and captain of the ship.
What happened?
The concerned questions were asked to grade five pupils from a school in Nanchong, Sichuan province. The students were asked to determine the age of the Captain if there were 26 sheeps and 10 goats present on his vessel.
Answers provided
Whereas anyone would find it difficult to answer this impossible question, the Chinese students were able to provide the answer for the same.
The students were innovative in giving various answers to the questions in concern. Some chose to make a joke of it. One pupil wrote, “The captain is 36 years old. He is quite narcissistic, so the number of animals corresponds to his age”.
Others tried to use at least a little bit of logic, another student wrote, “The captain should be at least 18 years old because a minor is not allowed by law to operate a vessel”.
Then there were those who got straight to the point, another said, “We cannot be sure of the captain’s age. The number of the sheep and goats is irrelevant to the captain’s age”.
Test critical thinking
The school justified their reason for asking this bizarre question as they wanted to use this math problem to test students’ critical thinking – adding that there was no right or wrong answer.
The school added, “The role of education is not to produce standardized spare parts, each answer can reflect a different personality. A question that can have different answers is a good question”.
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Source: RT
