Bill, I know. It is awfully difficult to find the balance between being short and absolutely precise. I suffer from that (not too much) each time I have formulated a task for the students. Nearly each time someone with a bad grade comes to me and tells me that my formulation was not precise enough and therefore there is a possible reading which would make his response correct.

Once I got so fed up with these complaints that just for the fun of it I spelled all assumptions, even the trivial ones, in a task involving probabilities. I not just wrote 'fair dice' which usually to everybody is an acceptable expression, I wrote 'fair dice which has not been rolled previously and is replaced after each roll by another fair dice and is rolled by a person without the ability to roll a dice in a way to make a certain result more probable...".

My formulation was less ambiguous than before but also less easy to understand. I did get less correct solutions.

It is sometimes just fun to read what people actually have written and not what we know they have meant (and that's how I understand this thread here), but if you go for that game (finding a possible ambiguity in someone else's posts) with a serious intention then the fun stops. But as I said this is a fun thread.

Wolfgang