The Adams school contains eight rooms; each room contains 48 pupils; if each pupil has eight cents, how much have they together?
A pile of wood in the form of a cube contains 15½ cords. What are the dimensions to the nearest inch?
A man 6 ft. high weighs 175 lb. How tall is his wife who is of similar build, and weighs 125 lb.?
A stick of timber is in the shape of the frustum of a square pyramid, the lower base being 22 in. square and the upper 14 in. square. How many cubic feet in the log, if it is 22 ft. long?
Mr. Ames, being asked his age, replied: "If you cube one half of my age and add 41,472 to the result, the sum will be one half the cube of my age. How old am I?"
These samples, just given, of the kind of problem-solving that should not be emphasized in school training refer in some cases to books of forty years back, but the following represent the results of a collection made in 1910 from books then in excellent repute. It required only about an hour to collect them; and I am confident that a thousand such problems describing situations that the pupil will never encounter in real life, or putting questions that he will never be asked in real life, could easily be found in any ten textbooks of the decade from 1900 to 1910.
If there are 250 kernels of corn on one ear, how many are there on 24 ears of corn the same size?
Maud is four times as old as her sister, who is 4 years old. What is the sum of their ages?
If the first century began with the year 1, with what year does it end?