Gabriel Bejarano

Believe it or not?

http://listosaur.com/bizarre-stuff/top-5-reasons-rats-make-great-pets/

Blog submission number 2

Due Date: October 6, 2015 by 11:59 pm Mountain Standard Time

Point value: (20 points)

Learning objectives:

Recognize, observe, formulate, and understand mathematical connections in everyday life

Analyze, think critically about, and demonstrate a meaningful understanding of various mathematical concepts by effectively communicating their thinking and reasoning for their solutions and mathematical connections to real world situations (in other words, rather than simply knowing how to solve any particular problem, students should be able to explain how they to come to a particular solution and as well as explain why it is correct)

Apply general strategies to more than one type of mathematical problem 

Comfortably and effectively utilize a variety of strategies to solve any given mathematical problem 

Background:

This blog submission is an exercise in recognizing real world applications of a mathematical concept.

Directions:

Part a:

Find a piece of media content (in a newspaper (online or not), journal (online or not), magazine (online or not), movie, video clip, you-tube video, billboard, advertisement, etc), in which a particular argument is made (i.e. drinking apple cider vinegar daily improves digestive health).

Rewrite the statement in the premise/conclusion format.  

Good pets are affectionate clean beings. 

Rats are affectionate clean beings.

Therefore, rats are good pets.

Use Venn Diagrams to test whether the argument is valid or invalid.

Determine which category the argument falls into and explain why: 

Valid and true (sound) 

Rewrite the argument as a conditional statement. 

If rats are affectionate clean beings then they are good pets 

Use truth tables to test whether or not the argument (written in conditional form) is a tautology.   

The statement in conditional form may have a solution mathematically (tautology), but does it make sense in real life? Explain. 

The statement in conditional form may not have a solution mathematically (not a tautology), but does it make sense in real life? Explain. Yes rats are actually good pets I had one. They are great.  They are both clean and affectionate. 

What are some conclusions can you make about the usefulness of truth tables in the context of tautologies.  It can make you realize that even though you may think rats are good pets they may not mathematically be considered good pets by all people.

Test the argument using “steps to evaluating media information” on page 10 of the textbook.

If your argument is a fallacy, does it fall into any of the fallacy categories in section 1A of the textbook? If yes, explain why?  It kind of false into a hasty generalization because I suppose not all rats are clean and affectionate. Some are probably pretty dirty and mean. 

Write a brief narrative detailing whether this experiment helped or didn’t help you to think more critically about media information. Yeah it did. Its always good to make sure sources and so on are completely accurate.