IT had been 16 years. That's 16 long years – or half of my life in fact – since I had sat a GCSE maths paper.
So imagine my fear when I sat down with a copy of one of last summer's exams.
I did so with the knowledge that I gained a C grade way back in 1997. Surely I could manage to get the same again. Or could I?
I turned the paper over and, to my surprise, I was confronted with what I found to be a fairly simple question.
It was a pictogram showing how different people prefer certain modes of transport. I quickly answered questions relating to it, including how many people travelled by car and how many more people use a bus than a tram.
In fact I sailed through the first few questions, though I didn't obtain full marks with my bar chart, more through carelessness than anything else.
Among the other questions was a table showing the number of cakes sold by a shop over five weekdays. I successful worked out the mean number, as well as the amount of profit made from the supplied information.
Then I began to come unstuck on a question about the most suitable data collection methods for finding out how many people preferred a new road route in a hypothetical situation. It was a case of over-complicating things as the answers were an interview or a questionnaire. Perhaps as a journalist I should have known better.
All in all, I felt perfectly capable of doing the exam. I had gone into it knowing the maximum mark for that paper was a C, and that's exactly what I managed.
We asked ten people to answer the following question:
Here are six numbers: 14, 14, 15, 18, 21, 24. Why is 14 the mode?
Of the ten, eight provided the right answer - that 14 is the most common number.
