Real-Life Math
You are writing closed captions for a political speech that will
be broadcast later in the evening. It's a long speech, so you type as quickly
as you can to translate the spoken words into type.
"You need excellent
basic skills to write on the machine and must be able to type quickly and
get quicker," says Teri Darrenougue, a closed captioner in California.
As
your fingers fly over the keyboard, you are typing at a speed of 95 words
per minute. After you have typed for 2 hours, you are finally finished transcribing
the speech.
How many words did you type?
Of course, in closed
captioning, every word must be typed correctly. "You have to be able to concentrate
to do this accurately," says Darrenougue.
Unfortunately, your mind
wandered for a few minutes, and so you ended up with 600 mistakes in your
transcript! Keyboardists count their true words per minute by counting only
the correct number of words typed.
If you subtract the mistakes from
your total number of words, what is your revised words per minute typing speed?