Hello,
I am slightly confused with rounding. My teacher said that the rounding depends on the context of the situation; saying you would always round down in certain contexts. For example, let's say that you got an answer of 277.8 cars and the question did not specify rounding, my teacher would have rounded down to 277 cars.
However, according to the trial exams I am doing, they would have rounded normally - (in this case, rounding up 278 cars).
Can someone please tell me how VCAA expects our answers to be rounded?
And is rounding to the "nearest" whole number/car/month (etc.) the same as rounding to the "correct" whole number/car/month (etc.)?
It would be greatly appreciated if anyone could answer my questions with VCAA examples, feel free to ignore these questions.
Thank you
As has been pointed out, it does depend on the context of the question, but also on the wording.
I will use your answer of 277.8 cars
If the question had asked for the "maximum number of cars", then you would round DOWN to 277, because 278 is more than the decimal number calculated.
If the question had asked for the "minimum number of cars", then you would round UP to 278, because 277 is less than the decimal number calculated.
Incidentally, if the question had asked for the average, or mean, number of cars, and there was no rounding instruction, you would leave the answer as 277.8 because a mean value can be a decimal.
Your other question was about the wording of the rounding instruction. Recent exam questions generally have such rounding instruction as a separate sentence. For example, "Round your answer to the nearest whole number."; in which case you would round a number such as 12.501 to 13
If instructed to "Round your answer to the nearest hundred cars.", you would then round a number such as 277.8 to 300