During our early years in school, we had a poem in English titled 'A Mortifying Mistake' by Anna Pratt. It's about a girl trying to memorise her six-times table for a test the next day. She could not remember six times nine, and to remember she finally takes her favourite doll Mary-Ann and renamed her 54 for a day.
The poem goes like this:
I studied my tables over and over, and backward and forward, too;
But I could n’t remember six times nine, and I did n’t know what to do,
Till sister told me to play with my doll, and not to bother my head.
“If you call her ‘Fifty-four’ for a while, you ’ll learn it by heart,” she said.
So I took my favourite, Mary Ann (though I thought ’t was a dreadful shame
To give such a perfectly lovely child such a perfectly horrid name),
And I called her my dear little “Fifty-four” a hundred times, till I knew
The answer of six times nine as well as the answer of two times two.
Next day Elizabeth Wigglesworth, who always acts so proud,
Said, “Six times nine is fifty-two,” and I nearly laughed aloud!
But I wished I had n’t when teacher said, “Now, Dorothy, tell if you can.”
For I thought of my doll and—sakes alive!—I answered, “Mary Ann!”
It looks like Times Now belongs to the same school of mathematics as Dorothy, the girl in the poem. The channel was called out on social media for putting a weird graph that shows 39.8 per cent is more than 60.2 per cent.
In one of its shows aired at 10 pm, the question asked as part of a survey was, “Do you think India has taken suitable steps to give China a befitting reply?” The poll showed 60.2 per cent of the replies in the negative, while 39.8 per cent in the positive. However, while creating the pie chart, someone replaced the numbers to show that 60.2 per cent was less than 39.8 per cent.
Times Now has since deleted the tweet and apologised for the gaffe, with a new graphic.
Soon after Times Now pie chart began trending on Twitter. This is how Twitter reacted to this gaffe
It’s not been the best week for the Times Group. Earlier in the week, the company put out a story of a man who killed his wife in Bengaluru and went to Kolkata to kill her mother and finally take his own life. The team then put a picture of what they thought was the couple. However, to the team’s horror, a day later, the couple in the picture shared a video stating that they were fine and that the news team had taken their picture from Facebook because they had the same name.
