What Does trivial Mean
From the Latin trivialis , trivial is an adjective that allows to name something common and known by all . It is something vulgarized, does not stand out from the ordinary and lacks importance or novelty.
For example: “I have never heard such a trivial political speech” , “I like to read Jorge Luis Borges because none of his books is trivial” , “Enough of arguing, let's talk about something more trivial” .
Trivial is the opposite of profound or novel . Trivial sayings can be ignored, because they do not add something new or generate knowledge . That is why the adjective has denotes a certain contempt for the noun it modifies. A literary or film critic that describes a work as trivial shows that it lacks depth, that it does not generate a great impact on its audience.
From the study of its etymology, it can be seen that the term trivial represents the union of three subjects considered basic in the formation of the Middle Ages: logic, rhetoric and grammar. This preparation represented a path towards the most advanced disciplines, encompassed in the concept of quadrivium : arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.
It is interesting to analyze the deterioration that we have suffered at the cultural level , taking into account that the subjects that a millennium and a half ago were considered simple represent a great challenge for the current school population and that only a few consider putting a foot on the ground of quadrivium .
Trivial Pursuit is, on the other hand, a board game that consists of answering questions of general culture in order to advance. The inventors of the idea were sports editor Scott Abbott and photographer Chris Haney , and the game was released in 1981.
A few years later, Trivial Pursuit enjoyed considerable success in the United States. In 1988 , the Parker Brothers company , manufacturer and distributor of games, bought its license. Statistics show that until 2004 about 88 million copies of this game were sold , published in 17 languages .
The Trivial Pursuit has six categories of questions , each identified by a color on the board: Art and Literature (brown), Science and Nature (green), Entertainment (pink), Geography (blue), History (yellow) and Leisure and Sport (orange).
For mathematics , the word trivial is often used to refer to objects or problems that show a structure of very little complexity. It is worth mentioning that for people outside the world of numbers, whether due to a lack of vocation or knowledge, this simplicity is not always obvious. On the other hand, it is also called trivial those situations that do not generate a deep interest in those who study them but that must be pointed out when presenting a topic , simply because they are part of it.
The latter is usually given when it is intended to make a proof by mathematical induction (reasoning that is based on an infinite set of integers that share a series of properties ), which is usually divided into two: a first part in which it is left in evidence that if a theorem holds for a value n , then it will also hold for its successive ( n + 1); the attempt to verify the theorem for base cases (also called trivial), which are usually " n = 0" or " n = 1".
Another case of triviality in mathematics can occur when trying to show that a certain property is true for all the elements of a set: first, we will proceed to check each element of a nonempty set ; if, instead, the set were empty, then it could be said that all its elements fulfill the property, since there would be no way to prove otherwise.