The question below is from the second 2020 Specialist exam (not online), and was raised by commenter Red Five in the discussion here. This’ll probably turn into a WitCH but, really, the question is so damn stupid, it doesn’t deserve the honour.
Category: PoSWW
PoSWW 14: Offering Real Choices
The question below is from the first 2020 Specialist exam (not online), which is discussed here.
PoSWW 13: ScoMoFo Flashes His Goebbels
Sure, he’s sadistic, dishonest and an all-round incompetent fuckwit. But what a bloke!
PoSWW 12: They is Bach
There’s much we could write about Matthew Bach, who recently gave up teaching and deputying to become a full-time Liberal clown. But, with great restraint, we’ll keep to ourselves the colourful opinions of Bach’s former school colleagues; we’ll ignore Bach’s sophomoric sense of class and his cartoon-American cry for “freedom”; we’ll just let sit there Bach’s memory of “the sense of optimism in Maggie Thatcher’s Britain”.
Yesterday, Bach had an op-ed in the official organ of the Liberal Party (paywalled, thank God). Titled We must raise our grades on teacher quality, Bach’s piece was the predictable mix of obvious truth and poisonous nonsense, promoting the testing of “numeracy” and so forth. One line, however, stood out as a beacon of Bachism:
“But, as in any profession, a small number of teachers is not up to the mark.”
We is thinking that is very, very true.
PoSWW 11: Pinpoint Inaccuracy
This one comes courtesy of Christian, an occasional commenter and professional nitpicker (for which we are very grateful). It is a question from a 2016 Abitur (final year) exam for the German state of Hesse. (We know little of how the Abitur system works, and how this question may fit in. In particular, it is not clear whether the question above is a statewide exam question, or whether it is more localised.)
Christian has translated the question as follows:
A specialty store conducts an ad campaign for a particular smartphone. The daily sales numbers are approximately described by the function g with 
, where t denotes the time in days counted from the beginning of the campaign, and g(t) is the number of sold smartphones per day. Compute the point in time when the most smartphones (per day) are sold, and determine the approximate number of sold devices on that day.
, where t denotes the time in days counted from the beginning of the campaign, and g(t) is the number of sold smartphones per day. Compute the point in time when the most smartphones (per day) are sold, and determine the approximate number of sold devices on that day.PoSWW 10: Higher Powers
The PoSWW below is courtesy of Glen Wheeler (who is trying to distract us from another university). It comes from Macquarie University’s new ad campaign.
PoSWW 9: You Can Spell, But Can You Grammar?
PoSWW 8: Easy Solutions
PoSWW 7: Power Outage
PoSWW 6: Logging Off
The following exercise and, um, solution come from Cambridge’s Mathematical Methods 3 & 4 (2019):
Update
Reflecting on the comments below, it was a mistake to characterise this exercise as a PoSWW; the exercise had a point that we had missed. The point was to reinforce the Magrittesque lunacy inherent in Methods, and the exercise has done so admirably. The fact that the suggested tangents to the pictured graphs are not parallel adds a special Methodsy charm.
