Читать книгу Maths on the Back of an Envelope - Rob Eastaway - Страница 6

How is your arithmetic without the aid of a calculator? Try these 10 questions. There is no time pressure, and you’re allowed to use pencil and paper if you want. As you do these questions, you might want to think about how you do them. Are you recalling facts you’ve memorised? Do you use a pencil-and-paper method?

(a) 17 + 8

(b) 62 – 13

(c) 2,020 – 1,998

(d) 9 × 4

(e) 8 × 7

(f) 40 × 30

(g) 3.2 × 5

(h) One-quarter of 120

(i) What is 75% as a fraction?

(j) What is 10% of 94?

Solutions

I can still remember the thrill when I first got a calculator of my own. It was made by Commodore, and had red LED digits and buttons that made a satisfying click when you pressed them. It was a Christmas present, and I was 16 years old. I was captivated. Just being able to enter a number like 123456 and press the square root button was enough to send a tingle of excitement down my spine, as I gazed at all those digits after the decimal point. I’d never seen numbers to such precision before.

There were two things that came out of the arrival of cheap calculators.

The first was that we could all now do calculations that we would never have conceived of doing before. It was empowering, liberating and gave us a chance to see the bigger picture of mathematics without getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty of calculation.2

The second thing that happened was that we could now quote answers to several decimal places. The square root of 83? Certainly, sir, just give me one second – and how many digits would you like after the decimal point?

What could possibly go wrong?