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Everyday life usage of QR
Additionally, quantitative reasoning skills are needed in everyday life: in being an informed citizen, in making medical decisions, and in making financial decisions. Examples include:
Citizenship
Virtually every major public issue-from health care to social security, from international economics to welfare reform-depends on data, projections, inferences, and the kind of systematic thinking that is at the heart of quantitative literacy. Today's citizens should:
- Understand quantitative arguments made in voter information pamphlets (e.g., about school budgets or tax proposals).
- Understand how different voting procedures (e.g., runoff, approval, plurality, preferential) can influence the results of elections.
- Understand comparative magnitudes of risk and the significance of very small numbers (e.g., 10 parts per million or 250 parts per billion).
- Understand that unusual events (such as cancer clusters) can easily occur by chance alone.
- Be able to analyze economic and demographic data to support or oppose policy proposals.
- Understand the difference between rates and changes in rates, for example, a decline in prices compared with a decline in the rate of growth of prices.
- Understand the behavior of weighted averages used in ranking colleges, cities, products, investments, and sports teams.
Appreciate common sources of bias in surveys such as poor wording of questions, volunteer response, and socially desirable answers.- Understand how small samples can accurately predict public opinion; how sampling errors can limit reliability; and how sampling bias can influence results.
- Recognize how apparent biases in hiring or promotion may be an artifact of how data are aggregated.
- Understand student test results given in percentages and percentiles and interpreting what these data mean with respect to the quality of schools.
Personal Health
As patients have become partners with doctors in making decisions about health care and as medical services have become more expensive, quantitative skills have become increasingly necessary in this important aspect of people's lives. Individuals need QR skills in:
- Interpreting medical statistics and formulating relevant questions about different options for treatment in relation to known risks and the specifics of a person's condition.
- Understanding medical dosages in relation to body weight, timing of medication, and drug interactions.
- Weighing costs, benefits, and health risks of heavily advertised new drugs.
- Understanding the terms and conditions of different health insurance policies; verifying accuracy of bills and insurance payments.
- Calibrating eating and exercise habits in relation to health.
- Understanding the impact of outliers on summaries of medical data.
Personal Finance
Managing money well is probably the most common context in which ordinary people are faced with sophisticated quantitative issues. It is also an area greatly neglected in the traditional academic track of the mathematics curriculum. Topics include:
- Understanding depreciation and its effect on the purchase of cars or computer equipment.
- Comparing credit card offers with different interest rates for different periods of time.
- Understanding the relation of risk to return in retirement investments.
- Understanding the investment benefits of diversification and income averaging.
- Calculating income tax and understanding the tax implications of financial decisions.
- Estimating the long-term costs of making lower monthly credit card payments.
- Understanding interactions among different factors affecting a mortgage (e.g., principal, points, fixed or variable interest, monthly payment, and duration).
- Using the Internet to make decisions about travel plans (routes, reservations).
- Choosing insurance plans, retirement plans, or finance plans for buying a house.
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