Khan/khan-exercises — Issue #14719: Units - Weird units for problem
Author: KhanBugz
Created: 2012-02-27 08:35:33+00:00
State: open
Labels: chrome, other, win7

Reporter: rjacobson@ymail.com

The problem is: "An alien rocketship is traveling at a speed of 39 feet per hour. At this speed, how many inches will it travel in 1 second....?"

There's nothing technically wrong with this problem, but it's very weird. A rocketship that's traveling at 39 _feet_ per _hour_? That's one pokey rocketship.

Perhaps you could change the units to something that approximates a plausible rocketship speed, or replace "alien rocketship" with something more appropriate to this speed (e.g., "a turtle").

I've noticed similar issues with other word problems -- math that makes sense, but descriptions where the problems don't really match the units or scale in a real-world situation. Perhaps someone could give these a "sanity check."

[units.html?seed=133&problem=english](http://sandcastle.khanacademy.org/media/castles/Khan:master/exercises/units.html?seed=133&problem=english&debug)

[Answer timeline](http://sandcastle.khanacademy.org/media/castles/Khan:master/exercises/units.html?seed=133&problem=english&debug&activity=%5B%5B%22correct-activity%22%2C%22%5C%220.13%5C%22%22%2C165%5D%5D)

["0.13"]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.56 Safari/535.11

MathJax is loaded, ready, queue length: 0