Madam, How disappointing that the report (Home News, September 6th) of an interesting survey is spoiled by an innumerate main claim. Even more disappointing to find is that the source of the error is the statement released with the survey results.
This statement declared that “Four in ten adults incorrectly answer(ed) at least half or all of the six maths questions asked of the general public in this study”. Your report and its headline amplified this.
The peculiar phrasing must mean that 40 per cent of respondents got three, four, five or six questions wrong in the survey. That is not what the results show: the percentage of incorrect answers was 16, 17, 19, 24, 34 and 53.
Adding in the don’t knows and no-answers gives a figure of 44 per cent in two cases but that is not what your story reports and it does not support the general claim of your headline that “40% of Irish have difficulty with numeracy”.
A headline expressing that there was a clear majority of correct answers to five out of six numeracy questions would have been accurate.
There is little comfort to be drawn from the results of this survey. There is even less to be drawn from its misleading presentation. – Yours, etc,