Context is everything

Working with a student Monday on Business Math, the issue of contextual learning came up again. We were learning about disability insurance. The first part of the chapter was a review of arithmetic: multiplying by percentages, adding numbers with two decimal places, etc. No explanation, no context, just problems. The student is a nice, obedient kid, so he just muscled his way through (he had some problems with long division and multiplication of multi-digit numbers by each other). Finally, I asked him if he knew why we were asked to work these problems. He admitted that he had no idea.
I explained to him that benefits to be paid are often expressed as percentages of monthly or yearly income.
Then, we continued with the chapter, which explained the hows and whys and legalities of disability insurance and then finally that benefits to be paid are often expressed as percentages of monthly or yearly income. How hard would it have been for the textbook authors to put the explanation first and then given the problems? Knowing that the result needed to be in dollars and cents would certainly have helped him.