Article for 2012 Aug 30
This article is not in a series.
2012
2012 Aug
Aug 30 Thu
I have just received an important letter from the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) who have re-marked my last Biology exam. The overall mark has gone up (to an A-star), so now my total of A-stars, As, Bs, and Cs is 6,3,1,0. The B in Art still remains, the pesky thing. To be honest it isn’t that pesky: putting “B” with “art” gives “Bart”, which at least is a character in an animated comedy I like. Some-how “Aart” doesn’t sound like English. It sounds like Dutch. Or Double Dutch. Or Art. (Those last two are basically equivalent.)
At least I didn’t get an F.
The other reason why 6,3,1,0 is preferable to 6,4,0,0 is because it’s a nice arithmetic progression. 6 minus three is 3, minus two is 1, minus one is 0, minus zero is 0.
Having said that, 6310 as a single number is mathematically awkward. It doesn’t factorise well: its only factors are 1, 2, 5, 10, 631, 1262, 3155, and 6310, unusually few for a four-digit number. 6400 is much nicer. It has 27 factors, four times better than 6310, because it is 28 times 52. It is therefore also eighty squared. “Six thousand four hundred” is also quicker to say, as is “six A-stars and four As” compared to “six A-stars, three As and a B”.
And, of course, 4 As are preferable to 3 As and a B.
