Читать книгу Our Silver Pond - Валерий Жиглов, Valeriy Zhiglov - Страница 3

When I had my fourth year in a secondary school, Agnes, a girl of my age living not far from me, took a white and furry puppy in theirhouse, yet she did not like to spend time caring about him and feeding him in time. Therefore, the puppy spent most of his time in our yard, and finally we started feeding him. The neighbor had noticed that the dog preferred our yard to theirs, and used her chance to look kind and generous, by saying to us the dog was her present for us.

That was the time, when two Russian dogs already reached the space in a Russian spaceship, and they even came back to Earth safe. Those two lucky dogs were named Belka and Strelka. Because our puppy was white, too, we gave it the same name – Belka.

I saw a TV program about a dog that knew how to count, and I thought I wanted to teach our Belkato do the same. Earlier, I already taught Belka to find me on the scent. In the process of teaching, I used to command “down!” to the dog, while was rubbing myshoes with a piece of a sausage; then I was hiding in some room to order to the dog to look for me.

Belka thoroughly sniffed the floor and followed me. Having found me behind a closed door, or in a wardrobe, Belka started barking very loudly to be rewardedwith the piece of sausage.

Because I already had peculiar skills in training dogs, I decided not to wait with solving the task. I cut out several similar squares of white cardboard, and wrote a corresponding number on each square, from 1 to 9, and also signs of arithmetic operations, i.e. “plus”, “minus” and “equals”.

Next, I found a barely seen spot on the floor and rubbed it with a piece of sausage, and it was only then, would I invite Irina, a girl of my age living next door, to see the performance.

I used the cardboard squares to compose a simple arithmetic task. For example: “two plus three equals”. The square with the number “five” was placed in that specific point on the floor, which only I knew. Other pieces of cardboard with other, irrelevant, numbers were lying around.

Then I called for my dog Belka, which was in another room all the time; then I showed the arithmetic task to the dog, and asked the dog to find the correct solution among the cardboards on the floor. Having thoroughly sniffed around, Belka found the cardboard square with the number “five”, sat down nearby and started barking. Of course, the reward followed.

The neighbor was amazed and applauding, and she asked to do it again with a new task. Then I gathered the cardboard squares again and arranged a new arithmetic task out of them, for example: “nine minus three equals”. The remaining squares with numbers were mixed on the floor in such a manner, that the one with the number “six” appeared on the place that only I knew.

Then I called my dog, and a few moments later there was another spurt of positive, after the dog found the correct solution again. I did not demonstrate the trick more than twice or trice, to prevent the audience from guessing the algorithm. Still, neither other teenagers, normy parents nor other adults were able to explain how I did it, until I told them the secret myself. Then we all were laughing a lot, and Belka saw us in good mood, and was happy, too.