{"id":114,"date":"2006-04-01T22:59:55","date_gmt":"2006-04-01T22:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=114"},"modified":"2006-04-01T22:59:55","modified_gmt":"2006-04-01T22:59:55","slug":"exam-howlers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=114","title":{"rendered":"Exam Howlers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have you any examination howlers? I don&#8217;t mean mistakes made by students but errors in the questions themselves, particularly those which make one wonder whether the examiner understands maths as well as they should.<\/p>\n<p>My contribution is an A level question:<\/p>\n<ul>The function <img src='\/maths\/latexrender\/pictures\/8fa14cdd754f91cc6554c9e71929cce7.gif' title='f' alt='f' align=absmiddle> is defined by <img src='\/maths\/latexrender\/pictures\/5a04bc4b423912cf107aef5d74c2990e.gif' title='\\begin{displaymath}f : x\\mapsto\\tan3x-4x \\end {displaymath}' alt='\\begin{displaymath}f : x\\mapsto\\tan3x-4x \\end {displaymath}' align=absmiddle> and has domain <img src='\/maths\/latexrender\/pictures\/0228496e4f439d56dc43aaa062422e90.gif' title='0\\le x \\le \\frac{\\pi}{6}' alt='0\\le x \\le \\frac{\\pi}{6}' align=absmiddle><\/ul>\n<p><i>[That can&#8217;t be the tan function we all thought we knew]<\/i><\/p>\n<p>The next one comes courtesy of <i>Foostyle<\/i>:<\/p>\n<ul><img src='\/maths\/latexrender\/pictures\/806fc488a9ee2002ecd4ec6cbc274b84.gif' title='x=f(t)=e^{-t}(\\sin 2t+\\cos 2t)' alt='x=f(t)=e^{-t}(\\sin 2t+\\cos 2t)' align=absmiddle>. Show where this crosses the x-axis.<\/ul>\n<p><i>[Are you sure it&#8217;s the x-axis you want?]<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Your turn &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you any examination howlers? I don&#8217;t mean mistakes made by students but errors in the questions themselves, particularly those which make one wonder whether the examiner understands maths as well as they should. My contribution is an A level question: The function is defined by and has domain [That can&#8217;t be the tan function [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}