Posted on 10/19/2020 12:41:17 PM PDT by where's_the_Outrage?
My 1st grader's homework had a problem about the number of sides on a circle. I have a BS in Math and never thought about it, my initial thought was 1. Turns out there are multiple correct answers:
2 sides: Outside and inside
1 side: There is only one line
0 sides: A circle has no sides.
∞ (infinite) sides: Each point in a circle would be a separate side (yes, way too egghead for 1st grade)
Draw a line down the middle then get scissors and cut the surface in half. Do it again.
It is a multiple choice test.
A. Climate Change
B. Racism.
C. All of the above.
two
Seriously, you missed the entire point of my comment
Seriously, your comment was not correct.
2: Inside and outside. A 2-dimensional representation of a continuous arc does not have “sides” on its edge - it has tangents.
However, this is ore of an English reasoning problem than an Elementary math problem.
Take an 8 sided object with equal sides. Then double it. As you keep on doubling it the distance around the perimeter approaches 2 pi * r so with that I’d say it’s infinite sides.
Not exactly. The moon rotates one revolution for every revolution it makes around the earth. That’s why we always see the same side.
What is incorrect about it. Don’t you understand what I said.
Yes.
The reason behind this question is to teach/indoctrinate kids at a very early age that there is no right or wrong answers, that everything is relative.
Except there are right or wrong answers to the question.
So your example is invalid and for you to insist that the question means what you think it means and not what it says is indeed to insist there are no right or wrong answers. You are doing exactly what you say the schools are doing.
It’s not inclusive therefore inappropriate to say that there are 2 sides the inside and the outside and they never intersect.
That would be a disc. The circle is the “line” defining the circle’s perimeter.
How many toes does a circle have? How many cats does a mule have? How many Martians make up a quorum?
Circles don’t have sides. The question is . . uh . . just stupid.
Infinite points in the perimeter. As it takes two points to define a line, or side, I would say zero sides. There are no flat spots on the perimeter.
I understand zero minus swimming to the side of the round pool:)
Quite the contrary. There are multiple “right” answers depending on how you preceive a circle. If you see it as a continuous line then there are no sides. If you see it as a figure of an infinite number of angles, then it would have infinite sides. If you look at is as an enclosed figure then it might have two sides. So my statement holds, the answer is all relative to how one sees it i.e. the basis of leftist philosophy.
Also if I was trying to compute the area in the circle, I would break it up into an huge numbers of triangles which would create a shape with a huge number of sides.
However if you did that to an infinitely small triangle the side would be zero length with the area being zero. So a circle is a mystic shape that defies easy understanding mathematically.
Response from the teacher which is what I suspected:
” The math program for first grade teaches that a circle has 0 sides and 0 vertices which can be a little hard to explain to the first graders because they sometimes say that a circle has one line so it has one side (and that is true, but to follow our program we say that a side is a line segment so a circle has 0 sides).”
It depends on how hungry you are at the time—usually, I go for two sides, but if i’m going to have a larger meal later for dinner, say, I’d five go with one side or sometimes none (0)…
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