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But I bet you'd know if some calculated number was way too far-off.

I'm no Turing or Ramanujan, but my opinion is that knowing how the operations work, and as example understanding how the area under a curve is calculated, allows you to guesstimate whether numbers are close enough in terms of magnitude to what you are calculating, without needing to be exact in figures.

It is shocking how often I have looked at a spreadsheet, eyeballed the number of rows and the approximate average of numbers in there and figured out there's a problem with a =choose-your-forumula(...) getting the range wrong.



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