High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In mathematics education, the term word problem is often used to refer to any mathematical exercise where significant background information on the problem is presented as text rather than in mathematical notation. As word problems often involve a narrative of some sort, they are occasionally also referred to as story problems and may vary in the amount of language used. The modern notation that enables mathematical ideas to be expressed symbolically was developed in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. Prior to this, all mathematical problems and solutions were written out in words; the more complicated the problem, the more laborious and convoluted the verbal explanation. Examples of word problems can be found dating back to Babylonian times. Apart from a few procedure texts for finding things like square roots, most Old Babylonian problems are couched in a language of measurement of everyday objects and activities. Students hadto find lengths of canals dug, weights of stones, lengths of broken reeds, areas of fields, numbers of bricks used in a construction, and so on.