I don't see what you are getting at here. One quarter is four sixteenths. It is redundant to say that anything is divided into four quarters*, since the noun "quarter" means "each of four equal or corresponding parts into which something is or can be divided".
* Or two halves, or three thirds, or ten tenths, etc.
I am British but I used to live in the part of France called "le département des Pyrénées-Orientales" but but now I live not very far away over the border in Spain (I do my shopping in Portbou). Saying that "everybody" in France is "kinda anal" is a bit like saying "everybody in the USA is fat, infantile and stupid", that is, a vastly crass generalisation. Of course it may be defended as merely a friendly joke, in which case, I have already offered my riposte.
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Joe Nation
3
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Thu 29 Mar, 2012 12:49 pm
I had a teacher who insisted that we not say "divided into halves" for the same reason Contrex gave. We were supposed to say that something had been or was 'halved' because that word contained the meaning "divided".
We didn't like her either.
We used to stand within earshot of her and say "Say, Bill and Dan, would you like to third my lunch with me?"
Joe(wiseass)Nation
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McTag
4
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Thu 29 Mar, 2012 01:01 pm
You could divide an orange, or most other things with the possible exception of the atom, into two quarters and one half, say.
I've deliberately kept the numbers simple to aid the afflicted.
You could divide an orange, or most other things with the possible exception of the atom, into two quarters and one half, say.
You would be dividing it into three pieces, one of which was half its volume, or weight, or whatever, and two of which were each equivalent to a quarter, but you wouldn't be dividing it into four parts like business journalists do to a year when they use a number followed by the Q suffix.
The fact that we all divide our year into 4 quarters is neither incorrect nor is it a redundancy. It defimes that a business year is composed of 4 quarters . In business we do often define "6 or 8 Quarters worth of positive results"
The first line of the article that you attached reads:
Quote:
The U.S. economy grew at a solid 3% pace in the final three months of 2011
so my question to you is, which parts of this sentence do you not comprehend in the context of the title.
Naturally contrex is utterly correct in his aspersion and McTag flags an interesting spin off into particle physics.
If it was 4thQ, it would be easier to understand.
What does "restock shelves" mean in "NEW YORK (AP) – The U.S. economy grew at a solid 3% pace in the final three months of 2011 but that growth likely slowed in the first three months of this year as businesses cut back on restocking their shelves"?
Selected Answer
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