I dont see point in solving things like "My mother is 2 times older than me, but she was 3 times older than me 3 years ago, how old am i now?"
Its hard to solve and incredibly pontless becouse only total asshole would say how old he is this way.
Well i asked my teacher "What is it for?"
"Its for the test"
"But what is the test for?"
"So you can get grade"
"What is point in getting good grades since i can pass school with getting average of 2?"
"Stop asking stupid questions"
The end of story.
And i actually learnt all english i know from games, and the internet, not school.
A question like this is actually really important, since it's basically finding the equations given some information. I'm not even sure how to elaborate, since there's an infinite amount of possibilities for problems that you might get.
The question is a "stupid" question involving the age of some guy, because the question is easy for everyone to understand. There's probably going to be some question where for example, you have to find out how many adults and kids went to some movie theater given some information involving the money that the theater earned and each kid being with two adults.
It's really important to learn how to get the equation from the information given, because questions like this will appear forever. In electrical engineering, one question could be, "An Op-Amp in non-inverting configuration has 10 gain, and Rf equals 9k. What is the value of Ri?"
Heck, you'll have to do math like that just to keep track of your basic finances and budgeting.