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...problems About War for Classes in Arithmetic
problems About War for Classes in Arithmetic Author:David Eugene Smith Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PROBLEMS ABOUT WAR FOR CLASSES IN ARITHMETIC By DAVID EUGENE SMITH General Object of these Problems.—The general object of these problems is apparent. B... more »riefly stated, they are designed to lay before young people in the elementary schools, at the most impressionable age, the fact of the wastefulness of war. The questions are so framed as to emphasize this point at various stages in the study of arithmetic, and to do it in such a way as to give the pupil not only some valuable work in computation but some facts which will influence his later thoughts and actions on the question of war. On the Nature of a Good Problem.—In order to be a good problem in arithmetic, a question must involve the kind of computation which the average citizen needs to know, which principle excludes such a topic as cube root; it must ask for a result which the average citizen might naturally wish to find, which principle excludes the finding of the time in which a given sum will yield a given interest at a given rate; it must be interesting, or easily capable of being made interesting to a pupil, which excludes problems about the population of a place like Mukden; and it must be stated in language which is fairly familiar to the class, which, in the early grades, excludes problems about proteids. For example, the following is a type of a bad problem: "The cost to France of the Franco- Prussian war of 1870, in francs, is the positive root of the quadratic equation x —17,999,999,998 — 36,000,000,000=0. Find the cost." Such a problem is ridiculous.' No one would ever find the cost in any such way, and the mere statement of the question would bring reproach upon the subject of algebra. Equally bad would be a problem framed on such a plan as this: "In 1913 the amount paid by England for war purposes p...« less