ODPOWIEDZ NA PYTANIA:
Read the article again and answer the questions in your own words.

16 What does Bertillon say is a much-used example of people using maths in daily life?

17 Which parts of the body did early humans first try to count?

18 What does Bertillon say about strict maths teachers?

19 What did Bertillon like about understanding maths when he was at school?

20 What is the writer intending to do with her article?


TEKS DO PYTAŃ:
Maths and numbers in life

Journalist Juliana Hurst meets Professor Pierre Bertillon

1
Professor Pierre Bertillon is the presenter of a new programme on maths in society, and I’m meeting him today at his base in the University of Paris. Bertillon is as fantastically enthusiastic to talk maths to me as he appears on screen.
2
‘Maths is all around us,’ he tells me. We don’t think about it, but all of us are using maths most of the time, in fact – when we work out prices if we’re shopping, for example. That’s an obvious thing…a very standard example. But what we maybe don’t think of is the maths involved when, say, we’re just thinking and trying to solve a problem in our life… and that includes young children … we’re analysing and calculating and trying to think logically … it’s all a form of maths in a wide sense of the word.’
3
‘As we talk here together, ok, you’re not doing mathematical sums directly, but you’re aware of your age and how much money you have, so you see the society you and I live in is obsessed with numbers. But this isn’t true of all cultures. There are hunter-gatherers in Amazonia who only use terms similar to ‘a few’ and ‘some’. And historically speaking, it’s people like you and me who are the unusual ones. For most of our species’ 200,000-year lifespan, there was no way of accurately representing quantities.’
4
Bertillon continues: ‘In most cultures, numbers themselves have been present historically. To put it very basically, our distant ancestors noticed that they had the same number of fingers on each hand, and that they had more fingers than hands, so they developed a way of counting these and similar things. Scientists agree that this was a result of us of walking upright on two legs … if we’d been on all fours we wouldn’t have noticed!’
5
So are we right to be so greatly concerned about numbers? ‘Well, what happens is that we want to put numbers to everything, whether or not that actually matters. So, for example, if we’re buying a new laptop we think too much about how many gigabytes it has, and we might buy such and such a product because it has more of these than another, even though we don’t really need so many. The trouble comes when we rely on numbers to tell us everything. In schools, we sometimes give students a number to represent how good they are at a subject … the same thing goes on in workplaces, but reducing everyone and everything to a number is not helpful behaviour.’

6
‘But,’ I put to the Professor, ‘surely when you’re doing some research for a school project, say, you want to get the best information available, so numbers help you … when you use a search engine it comes up with the most popular websites first.’ He shakes his head. ‘Ah, but just because a website has the most hits, it doesn’t mean it’s the best … in fact, it may not be accurate or reliable at all. So you have to use your judgement to work out who the real experts are – it’s becoming a vital skill in life these days.’
7
I tell him about my own experience of maths at school, and my own nervousness with the subject. He agrees with me that some people can be turned away from maths for life because of things going wrong for them at school – and regards this as a great pity. ‘Yes, maths more than any subject must be taught in a sympathetic way, because it’s easy to just get into a situation where you accept that “Oh, maths isn’t for me … I just don’t get it.” And maybe the teacher kind of agrees, and you get the idea that you haven’t got a mathematical brain, and then you’re missing so much!’
8
So what about the personality of the teacher, then? Can this really shape a person’s view of maths and numbers later in life? Bertillon tells me he doesn’t think that a strict teacher is necessarily a bad thing, but he does agree with me that teachers are more important in maths than with other subjects. He continues: ‘When I was in school, I realised that if you understood the basic method in mathematics, then you didn’t have to remember facts like in other subjects such as history or biology. In those subjects, you had to learn a huge number of names and dates, but not with maths.’
9
So now my article is finished. As a journalist, I will of course put it online in the form of a blog. Then I will keep track of how many people have liked and commented on it, and if only a few have done so, I will be upset. The bigger the number the better!