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    See Ya Later Calculator: Simple Math Tricks You Can Do in Your Head
    See Ya Later Calculator: Simple Math Tricks You Can Do in Your Head
    See Ya Later Calculator: Simple Math Tricks You Can Do in Your Head
    Ebook234 pages1 hour

    See Ya Later Calculator: Simple Math Tricks You Can Do in Your Head

    By Editors of Portable Press

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    About this ebook

    The math book for anyone who thinks they hate math, full of easy, entertaining and practical tricks for mentally solving problems in seconds.

    No matter how much you might try to avoid numbers, we all use math every day to calculate a tip, figure out an interest rate, or estimate the cost of the groceries in your cart. But the good news is, math can be easy—and even fun—if you know how to do it all in your head.

    With these simple and downright magical math tricks, you can do everyday math faster than it takes to dig out your phone and find the calculator app. Step-by-step and easy-to-memorize directions show more than 125 math operations anyone can do in their head.

    Plus, it features do-it-yourself math projects, puzzles, and a bonus section for advanced mathophiles. Get ready to tackle problems such as . . .

    • How to easily square any number
    • How to add three-digit numbers
    • How to use a mirror to measure the height of a building
    • How to make a ruler out of a dollar bill
    • How to use geometry to paint walls, cut floor tiling, and do other home renovations
    • How to subtract numbers . . . by adding

    And lots more . . . No calculator required.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 1, 2017
    ISBN9781626868120
    See Ya Later Calculator: Simple Math Tricks You Can Do in Your Head
    Author

    Editors of Portable Press

    Portable Press is a tight-knit group of writers, researchers, and editors who are responsible for some of the publishing industry’s most popular non-fiction trivia and facts books. Aside from creating the fan-favorite Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series (more than 16 million books in print since 1988), the Portable Press team also specializes in regional and kids’ titles, plus gift books, activity books, and whatever else strikes their fancy.

    Read more from Editors Of Portable Press

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      Book preview

      See Ya Later Calculator - Editors of Portable Press

      INTRODUCTION

      Math shouldn’t be a four-letter word! It’s useful, astounding, and even (gulp!) fun, yet four in ten Americans still claim they hate the subject. We figured that if we compiled the niftiest tricks, games, and do-it-yourself projects, we could help solve people’s irrational fear of math. From tips you can use in everyday life to special occasion algebra and geometry, See Ya Later Calculator has everything you need to master this radical subject. With these easy shortcuts, even our most numerically challenged readers will be able to do math in their head. Plus, the Pen + Paper Math section has bonus problems that are too hard to do mentally—unless you’re a math genius (in which case, you should write our next book!).

      Our math moguls, whose input was integral:

      1. GENERAL MATH

      ADD BY ALTERATION

      Unlike your dry cleaners, we do alterations…but with math. (This is a math book, after all, not a dry cleaners.)

      1 This trick helps make numbers more manageable and easily addable, so you can add them in your head. You just have to adjust the other number to account for any alterations you do on the first.

      2 Get one of the numbers up to a nice, round decade number, like 20, 30, etc. Do this with simple addition.

      3 Because 2 was added to one of the numbers, the same amount must be subtracted from the other number.

      4 Add the two altered numbers.

      ADD BY COLUMN

      Here’s a technique for adding a bunch of numbers without carrying over from one long column of digits to another—because not only is that annoying but it’s hard to do without a piece of paper in front of you.

      1 Add the digits in the ones column together.

      2 Add the tens column digits together. Place it below the sum of the other column, but move it over one placement space.

      3 Insert a 0 at the end of the second number, and add those two numbers together.

      Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.

      —Mickey Mouse

      PRE-DETERMINE YOUR GROCERY STORE TOTAL

      You’re at the grocery store. You’re on a budget, or the store takes cash only. That means you’re watching almost every cent—you’ll need to estimate as you go.

      Say you’ve come to the store to purchase exactly seven things: bread, eggs, milk, carrots, peanut butter, cereal, and a banana. You’ve got $20. Because you don’t have a calculator or paper with you (you’ve got your list memorized!), you’ll have to remember the prices along the way.

      The trick is to guesstimate (that’s guess + estimate) the prices by rounding up or down. If you do it to the nearest 50 cents (meaning if something is $0.20, round it down to 0; if something is $2.45, round up to $2.50), you’ll be very close to the actual figure at the end—and within your budget. Plus the numbers will be easy to remember as you work your way down your list.

      Nice going! Your guesstimate was just 77 cents from the total, and well within your spending limit. That means you can buy everything on your list…as well as pay the sales tax.

      SIMPLIFIED SUBTRACTION

      If two-digit subtraction is hard, it’s because things aren’t simplified far enough. Here’s a way to make it way simpler, way earlier.

      The key is to break the numbers into manageable chunks.

      1 Take the bottom number and round it down to a decade number and its remainder.

      2 Now just subtract the first number from the top number, then the second number from that.

      EASILY ADD UP THREE-DIGIT NUMBERS

      You probably learned to do this kind of problem by starting at the far right, and working your way left, carrying extra digits as you go.

      There’s an easier way: Work from left to right. As you do, you break down the numbers into more mentally addable chunks.

      1 Leave the top number alone, and then break down the bottom number into its hundreds column (400), its tens column (50), and ones column (6). Start by adding that top number to the bottom number’s hundreds value.

      2 Take that sum and now add the next value over, which is the tens column.

      3 Only one column left: the far right or ones column. Take the sum from the previous step, and add what’s in that spot.

      Then proceed with that 6.

      A 9-year-old boy named Milton Sirotta invented the word googol to stand for 10¹⁰⁰, or 1 followed by 100 zeros. (It can also be called ten duotrigintillion.) The name of the company Google came from an unintentional misspelling of googol.

      SUBTRACT A BIG NUMBER FROM 1,000

      Here’s a way to eliminate the carrying process when subtracting.

      1 Start by subtracting the first two digits of the second number from 9.

      2 Subtract the last and final digit not from 9, but from 10.

      3 That’s it. You’re done. No carrying the 1 or any of that nonsense. Just line up the digits.

      SUBTRACT BY ADDING

      This neat trick works when subtracting two numbers on either side of 100.

      1 Determine how much each number is less than and more than 100. In this case, 187 is 87 more than 100, and 93 is 7 less.

      2 Add 87 and 7, and you get 94, which is the answer to 187 - 93.

      THE POWER OF 9

      Here’s a nifty mathematical secret: every number that’s larger than 9 can be added up (or down) to 9. You can use it to win a bar bet, perhaps.

      Every number greater than 9 becomes 9. How? Add up the digits of the number, and subtract that sum from the original number. The answer is always 9 or a number that has digits that add up to 9.

      It works on big numbers, too—you just keep adding the digits and breaking them down until you finally get to 9.

      SUBTRACT LARGE NUMBERS

      Subtracting is easy. You just turn it into addition.

      Where do you even start with this? Right, you pretend that the 1 on the far right is an 11, and then you put a three down below the line, and then you carry the…blah. You can’t do that in your head, and it’s a pain to do on paper as well.

      1 Round up the bottom number, the one that’s being

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