Quantitative Literacy, Digital Update Thinking Between the Lines

"The overall goal of this book is to present and explain the quantitative tools necessary to understand issues arising in the popular media and in our daily lives. Through contemporary real-world applications, our aim is to teach students the practical skills they will need throughout their lives to be critical thinkers, informed decision makers, and intelligent consumers of the quantitative information that they see every day. This goal motivates our choice of topics and our use of numerous articles from the popular media as illustrations. Being an intelligent reader and consumer requires critical thinking. This fact is conveyed by the book's subtitle, Thinking Between the Lines. For example, visual displays of data such as graphs can be misleading. How can you spot this when it happens? A poll often presents, along with its results, a "margin of error." What does this mean? Banks often use the terms APR and APY. What do these mean? In these and many other practical situations, math matters. A nice example of the role in the text of critical thinking can be found in a discussion of how to graphically display federal defense spending. Similarly, instead of simply defining logarithms by formulas, we discuss how they relate to the decibel and Richter scales. Instead of just presenting graph theory, we discuss how it relates to spell checkers and the latest technology in air traffic control. This "in context" philosophy guides the presentation throughout the text; therefore, it should always be easy to answer a student if he or she asks the famous question, "What is this stuff good for?" We want to do more than just help students succeed in a liberal arts math course. We want them to acquire skills and experience material that they will be able to use throughout their lives as intelligent consumers of information"--