This was so fucking easy. I fail to see how anyone screwed it up. Divide by 5 is good. Same concept I used. I just moved the decimal one spot over to the left, then doubled it and added it to the original number. 45 becomes 4.5 4.5*2=9 9+45=54 This is basic math. If you can't do this without fucking up, how on earth do you leave a tip in a restaurant?
Here in the states we recently had a small fracas about the debt ceiling you may have been aware of. Despite the fact that the entire thing was purely budgetary in nature, every politician and pundit used thoroughly inadequate metaphors and descriptions to yell their points at the American people because we're so numerically illiterate that we can't wrap our heads around our own finances if they are presented in number form. In this way the public votes on policy it doesn't even hope to understand.
I was using tacos for Blue Dog's sake since he's said in the past it's his favorite form of currency.
There's a book I read called Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. It's not a very deep read, (not to mention that there's a couple spots in the book where he goes off on tangents and rants about astrology) but it completely fries the notion that being ignorant of mathematics can be anything but harmful. If you know math, you are far less likely to be ignorant about the world around you. That's not always the case; I know a couple guys who know a lot and are completely clueless. But I know for a fact that if you don't know math, you're more likely to not understand the proper vs. improper uses of statistics, believe logical fallacies, and as a result be a sucker for stupid arguments from people who are either stupid themselves or want to control those people.
You answered your own question. What does the average person need to know math for? Getting a job. Some guy was on the Colbert Report some time ago who said that the best predictor of future income was the number of math classes someone had taken. I'm sure that statement needs a few qualifiers, but at least among undergraduate students (who don't go on to graduate school) it sounds about right.
You don't think this is possible through other methods? I'm good on the science aspect but fucking suck with math for example. Despite this I've always done stellar in my science classes because I look at things from a different perspective. I'm not being a solipsistic jerk, this is a legitimate statement and question. Without turning this into a political thread, I know what the actual issue is. Anyone with half a brain knows it's a budgetary issue. The simple fact is people are stupid.
Look, I'm sure some people learn critical evaluation skills from giving blowjobs to goats. I'm sure there are an almost infinite way of learning those things. But math is fundamentally a useful basis of learning for pretty much everyone, and a solid way to learn those critical reasoning skills. Also... pretty much all science is just applied math.