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Ask for help > chess players, help me please :)
chess players, help me please :)
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ELOJOLIE274
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chess players, help me please :)
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good morning :)
I �ve been reading George R. R. Martin �s short story collection Dreamsongs and there �s an expression I understand but don �t know how to say aloud...
in one of the short story, the character talks to his wife about a chess tournament he played back in college.
there were 8 rounds, and at the beginning of the last round his team �s score was 5 - 2.
above his team 3 teams had the following score 5 1/2-1/2
but how do you say that? I understand what it means (in a round 2 of the 4 players won, the other 2 lost, so they neither won nor lost the round), but i �d like to be able to say it aloud... shouldn �t it be 5 1/2-1 1/2???
this is the extract I �m refering to:
"Going into the last round, the University of Chicago was in first place, alone, with a 6-1 match record. [...] Behind them were three other schools at 5 1/2-1/2. [...] Then you had a whole bunch of teams at 5-2..."
thanks for your help!
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2 Mar 2013
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yanogator
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I �m not sure whether you are asking an English question, a Mathematics question (my specialty), or both, so I �ll answer both. First, I agree that it should be 5 1/2 - 1 1/2, since there have been 7 points awarded so far. If you are asking how to read 5 1/2 - 1/2, it is "five and a half to one half". The corrected score is read "five and a half to one and a half". Writers don �t always pay attention to numbers. The short story "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry begins "One dollar and eighty-seven
cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies." If 60 cents was in pennies (one-cent pieces), then the remaining one dollar and 27 cents was not in pennies. However the 7 cents must contain at least two pennies. I would say to take this as an opportunity to combine an English lesson with a Maths lesson. Bruce |
2 Mar 2013
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ELOJOLIE274
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Thank you Bruce for your very clear explanationS :)
it �s such a small mistake but it bothered me... and since the last time I played chess was 10 years ago against an 8-year-old I really needed some help ;)
merci beacoup!
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2 Mar 2013
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yanogator
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Oops! I just realized that I didn �t tell you the correct way to read the record. When I wrote "five and a half to one and a half", I was thinking of scores. For a record, we just pause between the two numbers, so it is read "five and a half, one and a half". Bruce |
2 Mar 2013
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