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| Preface | |
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| Introduction: What Math Can Do for You | |
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| The Most Valuable Chapter You Will Ever Read | |
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| Are service contracts for electronics and appliances just a scam? | |
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| How likely are you to win at roulette? | |
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| Is it worth going to college? | |
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| How Math Can Help You Understand Sports Strategy | |
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| Why could Bart Simpson probably beat you at rock, paper, scissors? | |
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| What are “pure” and “mixed” strategies? | |
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| Is a pass play or a run play more likely to make a first down? | |
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| How Math Can Help Your Love Life | |
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| How do you know when he or she is “the one”? | |
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| Whom should you ask to the senior prom? | |
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| Why are women reputed to be fickle while men are steadfast? | |
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| How Math Can Help You Beat the Bookies | |
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| Why should your lottery ticket contain numbers greater than 31? | |
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| Can you overcome a negative expectation? | |
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| When should you bluff and when should you fold? | |
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| How Math Can Improve Your Grades | |
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| Will guessing on a multiple-choice test get you a better score? | |
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| What test subject should you spend the most time studying for? | |
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| What subject should you major in? | |
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| How Math Can Extend Your Life Expectancy | |
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| How dangerous is it to speed? | |
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| Why might your prescription show the wrong dosage? | |
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| Should you have a risky surgery or not? | |
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| How Math Can Help You Win Arguments | |
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| Was the bailout the only way to save the banks? | |
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| Do you really have logic on your side? | |
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| What are the first arithmetic tables learned by children on Spock's home planet? | |
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| How Math Can Make You Rich | |
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| How can you actually make money off credit card companies? | |
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| Will refinancing your house actually save money? | |
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| Is a hybrid car a better value? | |
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| How Math Can Help You Crunch the Numbers | |
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| How did statistics help prevent cholera in nineteenth-century London? | |
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| Why won't Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf's son be a tennis prodigy? | |
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| Are you more likely to meet someone over 7 feet tall or someone more than 100 years old? | |
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| How Math Can Fix the Economy | |
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| What is the “Tulip Index”? | |
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| What doesn't the mortgage banking industry understand about negative numbers? | |
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| What caused the stock market crash of 1929? | |
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| Arithmetic for the Next Generation | |
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| How can you get your kids interested in math? | |
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| What is the purpose of arithmetic? | |
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| How does Monopoly money make learning division easier? | |
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| How Math Can Help Avert Disasters | |
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| What caused the Challenger space shuttle crash? | |
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| How could we have prevented much of the damage from Hurricane Katrina? | |
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| How can you determine the possible cost of a disaster? | |
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| How Math Can Improve Society | |
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| How much is a human life worth in dollars? | |
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| When should legal cases be settled out of court? | |
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| At what point does military spending become unnecessary? | |
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| How Math Can Save the World | |
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| Do extraterrestrial aliens exist? | |
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| How can we prevent nuclear war and a major asteroid impact? | |
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| When is the world going to end? | |
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| Notes | |
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| Index | |