British Adults Forget Basic Mathematics

In a 2016 YouGov survey of 2,000 UK adults, 35% said they no longer knew how to calculate the mode, 31% the median, 28% the mean, and 27% the area of a circle. One in 5 had forgotten how to work out fractions or percentages, while 26% could not calculate a square root. The gaps extended beyond mathematics, with 23% unable to explain when to use a semicolon and 41% unable to recall or explain mitosis. The Oxford Open Learning Trust commissioned the survey to examine how much school knowledge adults retained.

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