Let’s face it. Math is not everyone’s favorite subject. Most people would rather use a calculater to figure out how much something costs with tax or they depend on the cashier and the cash register to determine how much chage they should get back. I’m not one of those people.
For as long as I can remember I have always been playing with numbers in my head. Now I don t have a doctorate in math or nuclear engineering or anything like that. I’m just your average guy who happens to like math and playing with numbers in his head. If I’m watching something on TV or listening to the radio and someone mentions a date that something was created, I immediately do the calculation in my head to figure out how many years that is. I’m probably not the only person who’s like that but I’m guessing that there aren’t many of us.
Let s begin with a small example:
93 + 48
Believe it or not this is really simple. The trick is to round one or both of the numbers up(or down) to a multiple of 10. This is because it’s easier to add numbers that have a zero on the end. So going back to our example here the easiest solution is to add 7 to 93 to make it 100.
Our problem now becomes:
100 + 48 = 148
Now this is not the final answer. I have what I like to call “My Little Rule”. Basically it states that whatever you do at the beginnig, you must do the opposite at the end and with the same amount. In this case what we did at the beginning was add 7 in order to make the addition easier. We must therefore subtract that same amount from the result above to get the answer.
148 7 = 141
Now you’ve probably heard of the phrase “There’s more than one way to skin a cat”. Why you would want to skin a cat or even have more than way to do it is beyond me but I digress. What that phrase means is that there’s more than one way to solve a problem and math is no different. However for my examples I’m going to show what in my opinion is the easiest method.
Let’s do another one but this time with three digits:
267 + 148
Now don’t panic! For this one we’ll use my divide and conquer method. This means that we’ll break one of the numbers down into multiples of 10 so we’ll have some zeros on the end and this will make adding a whole lot easier. Let s pick the second number, 148.
So now we have:
267 + 100 + 40 + 8
See how easier it becomes now? Adding 267 and 100 is easy.
267 + 100 = 367
To add 367 and 40, change 367 to a multiple of 10 by subtracting 7 and making it 360. Remember it s a lot easier to add numbers that end with a zero.
So now we have:
360 + 40 + 8 = 408
Now going back to “My Little Rule” at the top, we subtracted 7 at the beginning so we must add it back.
408 + 7 = 415
This might look like a lot of steps to do but when you practice doing it in your mind it s really fast after you get the hang of it. There are a lot more examples I can do here but that would make for an article the size of a book so I think I’ll stop here for now. Hopefully you get the basic idea. I ll be writing more articles about doing math problems in your head so watch for them. You can also find more on my web site. See you next time.
Author Resource:
K. Parsons is an affiliate marketer who has written more than a dozen articles on many different topics. He enjoys reading, going to the movies, and going to the airport to watch airplanes. Web site: http://www.pixeldiary.com
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