Pumps' Perplexities

When you are going to school, as a young person, they teach you
mathematics.....They teach you many forms of it, algebra,
geometry and trigonometry.....There are even scientific uses for
all these numbers......

Up and into your High School years you are taught that 1 and 1
always equals 2......That the hypotenuse of a triangle is always
in direct proportion to the sum of its sides.....It is all straight
forward and there is always a correct answer......

After these 'formative' years one finds out that 1 and 1 does not
always equal 2 because other people like to play with the
numbers and manipulate them in order to get the answer that
they want.......In the finance world it is know as 'cooking the
books'......In the political world 'polling data' and survey
results......

I wonder what kind of 'test mark' a teacher would give someone
if they said, "I have 50 people who think one side of the triangle
measures "X" and another 50 people think the other side
measures "Y", therefore I think the hypotenuse is "Z".......Man,
would you be in detention after school so fast, you would not
know what hit you.......How things do change.....Pumps