Plorian Cajo vi BOOK ONE BY FRANK M. McMURRY, PH.D. "1 TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AND C. BEVERLEY BENSON, C.E. PURDUE UNIVERSITY New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1926 All rights reserved PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1926. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co. 4103 TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS WHO HAVE THIS BOOK: Have you ever thought how often you use Arithmetic? Every time you set the table for dinner, or count the number of children for a game, or look at the clock to tell the time of day you are using numbers. That means that you are using Arithmetic. You are using it every time you hunt for a page in a book, or call a telephone number, or read the number on a house, or pass pencils and papers at school, or study a calendar to learn how soon your birthday will come. Do you suppose that you use Arithmetic every day? Watch to see if you do. If you have trouble in doing some of these things, this book will help you. That is one reason you have it. You are beginning to need Arithmetic in many other ways. For instance, you are now old enough to help your mother by running errands for her to the store. But to do that well you must know how to count money, how to add up your bills, and how to find what change you should receive. One must know a good deal of Arithmetic to do all this. You can help your teacher in several ways. The record of attendance that she must keep takes a lot of time. You can do most of this work for her when you have learned how to find the number of boys and girls present, the number M270595 absent, and the places where these numbers should be written in her record. Many schools must keep lists that show the height and weight of each child. Can you measure a person's height and can you find a person's weight? Often the average height and weight of the children are also wanted. Of course you must know how to measure with a foot rule and how to use weighing scales to get one's height and weight. And to get the average height and weight of several children you must know what is meant by average and a good deal about adding and dividing. You are old enough to learn such things as these, and this book will help you. This book tells many stories that you may like. Every year we have millions of quarts of berries to pick and most of this work is done by children. Sometimes whole families pick day after day together. There is a story here telling how much faster some children can pick than their parents; how a record of one's picking can be kept; and how much money boys and girls often earn in this way. There is another story telling how a girl took care of a flock of chickens; what she fed them and what the feed cost; the number of eggs she collected each day and what she sold them for; the number of eggs a good hen lays in a year and the number of hens it would take to keep a family like yours in eggs. There are other stories telling about cows and sheep and many other interesting things. One long story shows how large a farm is and what part of an acre of land it takes to supply one person for a year with corn and wheat and cotton. Do you know how big an acre is? A class of children in one of our large cities was once asked how long it would take them to walk around a square 160-acre farm. The first answer was A half an hour," and the second was "A half a day." Was either right? Do you know how to find out? 66 You will learn many things about the city, also, in this book. For instance, when your grocer buys a crate of berries at 20 cents a quart and sells them at 30 cents, he seems to make too much money. But when you consider his rent and his cost of delivery and other expenses, his profit seems much smaller. And if four or five of the boxes are not sold and spoil on his hands, you can see that he might even lose money on his fruit. That is only one of his troubles. But if he knows that such a thing may happen with many of the things he handles, how can he tell at what prices to sell them? When you have studied about the grocer, you may be surprised at the care he must take in order to make a living. Remember that this book is an Arithmetic, and that all these stories are told by figures rather than by words. You may want to stop sometimes to think whether Arithmetic tells as good stories as some of the other story books that you know. FRANK M. MCMURRY |