Question

State whether the following sentence is always true, always false or ambiguous. Justify your answer.
“Makar Sankranti falls on Friday.”

Answer 1

Hint: First we define what a statement means by if it is always true, always false or ambiguous. Then using the concept of total weeks not covering total number of days every year, we check if Makar Sankranti will fall on Friday or not and using the definitions we will decide which category the statement falls in.

Complete step-by-step answer:
A sentence is always true if what it asserts is always the case and a sentence is always false if what it asserts is not always the case.
A sentence is ambiguous if the meaning of the sentence is uncertain, in a way the writer is confusing the reader for the meaning of the text.
We see the sentence here is “Makar Sankranti falls on Friday.”
But we know Makar Sankranti is a festival day in the Hindu calendar that celebrates the solar cycle, and it falls almost on the same date every year (14 January or 15 January) except in some years when it falls a day earlier or a day after the date.
We know that every year the days of week move one day ahead because there are 365 days in a year and there is not an even number of weeks in 365 days. If we calculate 52 weeks with each week having 7 days gives us 364 days which leaves one day, so the following year is always one day forward than the previous year.
Number of days divided by number of days in a week will give us a remainder 1
i.e. \[365 = 7 \times 52 + 1\], on comparing it to the general equation of dividend divided by divisor \[a = bq + r\], the remainder is 1.
So there is one day left which marks the start of the new week.
So, we can say the sentence “Makar Sankranti falls on Friday.” is not always true as Makar Sankranti falling this year on Friday will make it fall next year on a Saturday and so on but it will fall again on a Friday after a few years so the sentence is not always false.
So, the sentence is uncertain which means it falls in the category of ambiguous sentence.
So, the statement given in the question is ambiguous.

Note: Students might get confused between the fact that Makar Sankranti falls on friday one year and next year it will change so the statement is always false which is wrong because as we know there is a repeating cycle of calendars after a certain period and Makar Sankranti will again fall on friday.