system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
My daughter has a trig question that was driving me bonkers. It had problems like this.

Dan is flying in his plane. His altimeter fails. To maintain his altitude without it, he looks around and notices that a mountain to the left is at a declination of 12.33 degrees. The Georgia dome is to the right and he notices the angle of declination is 7.27 degrees. He used to bike between them and the distance was 15.83 miles. What's his altitude?

Ffs... "Notices" an angle, while flying to two digits past the decimal? Is going to do difficult trig to maintain his altitude? Is ignoring elevation differences between the mountain and stadium? Magically knows the straight line distance between the locations from BIKE RIDING?  It was a word problem and I was SOOOOO tempted to write "this question is WILDLY stupid and also lacks enough details to provide an answer... Dan should immediately call the tower and get help landing the plane"
gpt
This kind of problems helps immensely in imagination. This is a geometry question, so visualization is the first and only major problem. 

Yeah, I agree that the story is idiotic but the career in science is riddled with problems where you are just given way too much information out of which most of it might be useless but without going through it, you will never solve it. So, the nonsensical story in math, physics, chemistry and biology problems from school are basically building the base there. 

And this is coming from a student. I thought all this is nonsense but it has shaped my problem solving skills, even the day to day problems. 

Have a bit faith in material but never stop to doubt it.