When I was in grade school, my mom used to snark about some of the more agricultural story problems in the homework for my math classes. Case in point: with a multiplication problem concerning a certain number of rows of corn in a field with so many stalks per row and so many ears of corn per stalk, the question was how many ears of corn the farmer could expect to harvest. Mom’s reply: “Well, the cutworms ate some of these seedlings over here before they even came up, and some smut got into these ears over here, and crows picked off some the ears over here…”
When I was in grade school, my mom used to snark about some of the more agricultural story problems in the homework for my math classes. Case in point: with a multiplication problem concerning a certain number of rows of corn in a field with so many stalks per row and so many ears of corn per stalk, the question was how many ears of corn the farmer could expect to harvest. Mom’s reply: “Well, the cutworms ate some of these seedlings over here before they even came up, and some smut got into these ears over here, and crows picked off some the ears over here…”
Thus obviating the need for legal disclaimers before word problems.