The importance of the second decimal place.

Well, another weekend, another disastrous exam. But I have learnt a very important lesson from the mock paper. The lesson is on the importance of the second decimal place.
The paper had a case-let which was based on geometry. It was something about some cows tied to the corner of a triangular field, pond in the center,…..goes on. The case-let had 3 questions which followed, that asked us for approximate values.

The answers all involved using the value of the square root of 3 (which is 1.732050807568……..). Coming back to the point, I managed to decipher the question and solve it to a point where it involved mere substitution of numeric values. The wise one (yours truly) decided that approx values meant I could substitute 3^(1/2) as 1.7. After all, they wanted the approximate value. And then the walls came crashing down.

I got the answers, but none of them seemed to tally with the options given, so marked the closest option. And as luck would have it, all my answers were wrong. But how, but why? After I recovered from the shock, managed to get myself together, stop cursing myself for being me, I calmly reworked the problem and still arrived at the answers I had got previously. So decided to give up (what? Give up so soon….Wiley Coyote never gave up on catching the roadrunner….beep beep) and check the answer key.

Another round of cursing myself for being me. All I had to do was substitute the square root of 3 with the value of 1.73 and not 1.7.One decimal place? That’s it? I messed up 3 problems and instead of gaining 12 marks I lost 3 marks, all because of one decimal place? This is just plain stupidity. Being an idiot at exams is my idiosyncrasy.

So, lesson for the day. Always take upto 2 decimal places of value. This is how I prevent me from scoring.