re: What is the simplest thing you have ever had to explain to a competent adult?

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That going outside barefoot when its cold and wet will make you sick.

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My grandma would say this all the time.



I am questioning the abilities of the posters in this thread that say they needed 30 minutes to explain a simple concept to a person that did not understand it.

How well are they explaining it?

It shouldn't take that long. Maybe they don't know it that well themselves.

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That is actually confusing if you don't give them more info.

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I did provide more info. I made it clear I was talking about absolute numbers. I may have used something like from 3 balls to 5 balls. I tried out different numbers to see if just that one example was the hang up. They had no grasp of percentages at all.

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Two separate people, one 20 and the other almost 40, thought going from 3 to 5 was a 2% increase instead of a 66.7% increase. I asked them both a number of questions to test their knowledge, and they failed just about every one of them. I have found this to be a common occurrence among adults.

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There are people on this site who not only don't know that a decrease from 10% to 7% is a 30% decrease, but were so firmly sure of themselves that they actually called out the person who asserted it. Not sure who it was, but they actually gave him shite about it. For some reason, they thought that the fact that it was percentages instead of raw numbers made a difference. They literally couldn't comprehend that, just as 7 is 30% less than 10, 7% of x is 30% less than 10% of x.

Having to explain anything car related usually leads me to these sort of interactions. I had to watch once as my old man explained to a gentleman that the "turbocharger" on his bone stock vehicle was in fact an alternator. Also, those two vertical stripes people throw on above the drivers side front wheel indicate that you are a rookie on a race course - whereas most folks do it because "it looks cool"

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They literally couldn't comprehend that, just as 7 is 30% less than 10, 7% of x is 30% less than 10% of

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I think you are getting into semantics here. It IS a 3% difference. So someone may view that as a decrease of 3%.

I mean if I had 50 widgets and lost 25 of them, I'd say I had a decrease of 25 widgets just as soon as I'd say I have a decrease of 50% of my widgets. If I lost 10% more, I may say I had a decrease of 5 apples, not necessarily say I had a 20% decrease.

That's awesome

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Slang Day was epic - did that continue in the later years?

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I believe so. It's been a while (took the class in 2003).

His stories were hilarious. The "frick speech" was also pretty damn good.

Was sad when I heard he left the university years ago.

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I have explained at great length that multiplying by 1.33 will not create a 33% profit margin. They cannot grasp gross profit not being synonymous with markup.
Cost $10x1.33= $13.30 so 3.30/13.30= 24.8% profit on the sale.
Cost $10/.67= $14.93 so 4.93/14.93= 33%
Even with this example there are a few fellow employees calling it fuzzy math. They say I'm lying to customers when I say I'm only making __% profit if I use this method.

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I will say, when I first got into sales, I did struggle with this

It makes perfect since to me now but at the time, I thought people were nuts.

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I mean if I had 50 widgets and lost 25 of them, I'd say I had a decrease of 25 widgets just as soon as I'd say I have a decrease of 50% of my widgets. If I lost 10% more, I may say I had a decrease of 5 apples, not necessarily say I had a 20% decrease.

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You have to clarify what you are losing 10% of. If you have 25 and you lost 5, that would be losing 20% of what you had before you lost the 5. If you mean to express the percentage of the amount you had before you had 25, that requires clarification.

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I think you are getting into semantics here. It IS a 3% difference. So someone may view that as a decrease of 3%.

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When you start with x and then the amount changes, the percentage change is based on the relationship of the new amount to x. If x = 10% of something and the amount changes to 7% of that something, the percentage change is 30%. As for semantics, yes, I guess in a way it is semantics because it is giving the words their actual meaning.

It would be accurate to say that the new amount is three percentage points lower than the old amount, but that's not the same as saying it's 3% lower because you are clarifying that the percentage change you are referring to is the percentage of the whole, not the percentage of the starting value.

That the earth isn't 6000 years old.