Re: Time to retire?

[John Clement <clement@HAL-PC.ORG>]

I got a lot of questions about a question involving a car hitting a parked
moving van.  I finally got tired of the question is the van parked or is it
moving, so I dropped the moving.  The question actually did not require
knowledge of movement because it asked them to compare the force on the car
with the force on the van.  Surely they have seen commercials for moving
companies???

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> >    Well, Rick, a few years ago I got blasted for an exam
> question which was
> > a vector problem dealing with a sailboat and the wind
> direction.  I asked
> > for the direction of the wind with respect to the stern of the
> boat.  I was
> > taken to task by over 75% of the class because they claimed they weren't
> > sailors and didn't know the stern was the rear end of the boat.
> I'm not a
> > sailor either, but thought such a term was common knowledge. It
> never even
> > crossed my mind when writing the question that would be the
> difficult part.
> >                      Mike Monce