UPDATE (23/06/26)
Apparently the current digital version has this corrected. If that was already the case, and if the current paper version is also correct, then my post is not really kosher; it’s not fair to nitpick past stuff unless it indicates something particularly notable. It was dumb of me to not have checked, and I’ll update again or delete the post once the situation is clear. (I’m not donning a hair shirt over this but, unlike VCAA, I have standards.) (06/09/26 As near as I can tell, the most recent print edition of the text contains the error. So, all good, so to speak.)
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This one, a very welcome respite from the explicit nonsense, is due to frequent commenter, SRK. It is an exercise from Cambridge’s General Mathematics 34. As SRK notes, it is low-hanging fruit. But, when the fruit is that funny, you just have to pick it:
You Cambridge GM guys shouldn’t worry too much, though; it is a pretty stupid glitch but it is still just a glitch. If it is any consolation, Cambridge’s index laws crap is much, much worse.
I was distracted by the woman in the red dress. What’d I miss?
You’ll laugh when you see it.
I saw it. That was a terrible attempt at a joke. I’ll do better in future.
Oh, sorry.
This is next-level funny!
But at least (unlike a recent VCAA paper…) they have the order correct.
Rings a bell. Is it in the error list?
Most definitely (but I will check). It was a
matrix, but the fill-in-the-blanks answer sheet gave an empty 
matrix.
It rings a bell, but if you can check, I’d appreciate it.
I think you’d all whinge even more:) if you had to teach ‘English’ … in the illiterate, ideology-debauched VCE-VATE wasteland.
Hi, Susan. We here like to think of it as howling rather than whingeing, but I don’t think anyone is suggesting other areas could not be worse. It’s just the bad we know.
What is VCE-VATE, and how is it a wasteland?
The MAV equivalent for English teachers: https://www.vate.org.au/
Thank you very much, NS. How is it a wasteland?
They seem to have corrected this error in their newest(?) edition of the textbook. I also noted they made the same mistake in the first example of this chapter as well.
Still frustrating that they make enormous profits from their bad maths.
Oh, is that true? Thank you, very much, Argos. If so, it is not kosher for me to post this, or at least not without a clarification.
Just for clarification, are you looking at the latest print versino or the latest digiital version? I looked at a recent digital edition but couldn’t easily get the current edition. It was a mistake to not confirm. I’ll check it out, and then update or delete the post.
Thanks for mentioning this. I just double checked the most up to date online version (which is dated to Feb 2025), and the error has been corrected.
I’m not surprised that my version had an error, since I probably just downloaded the text in 2023 and haven’t had need to re-download. But I’m still a bit confused for why quite a few students at my school independently noticed this error.
I’ll check the print version later.
Thanks, SRK. If the students noticed the error, then possibly it has recently been corrected, although the students could have second hand print or digital copies.
Mistakes happen in the best of text books. In Euclid’s Elements, there is a fairly serious mistake in Proposition 1.
I am just reading a book by H.G. Wells. It is newly published. Anyway throughout the book there are footnotes designed, I assume, to explain the meanings of words that modern readers might not understand. But there is no list of the explanatory footnotes; just the superscripts in the text.
Yes, I agree on the mistakees, and it is not the thing I look to attack here. Still, the matrix mistake was pretty funny. Still still, if the mistake was already corrected at the time of posting then it wasn’t kosher to post. Still trying to confirm.