(Disclaimer: I have ADHD and am completely useless when it comes to math. So please forgive me for being super-stupid on the subject.)
To my understanding, Mathematics are seen as completely logical. Which I don’t have a problem with except for when it comes to one certain thing in math that I just can’t make sense of as being considered logical:
Rounding of decimals.
To my understanding, the rule is that when you have a decimal that is 5 or higher, you round up. If 4 or lower you round down.
Two things that I don’t understand about this:
1. When you round up, you magically pull value out of the air that wasn’t there to begin with, and do the opposite when rounding down. How is this considered logical?
2. The rule isn’t applied universally. I’ve seen cases when, for example, making store purchases, no matter how low the decimal, it is rounded up and not down.
I appreciate any help you guys can give. Thank you in advance for the assistance! <3
In: 6
Rounding numbers is a practical thing, so technically you are allowed to do it however you wish. What you’ve described is one convention, written down in textbooks. What the stores do is another convention that’s probably written down somewhere in their policies. There’s also something called “banker’s rounding” which rounds halfs to the nearest even number, so 5.5 becomes 6 and 8.5 becomes 8. In short, there are a lot of various rounding methods used for different purposes.
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