Word: algebra
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Author Hogben's purpose is not to teach his young readers their algebra, but to show how man built up his world of signs and symbols to solve the problems of his everyday existence and then to expand his civilization. He starts with the sun and the moon, man's first clocks and calendars, and with the notches that the shepherd cut when counting his flock. Then come the calendar keepers, the powerful group who could tell people when to plant crops. Later men developed more complicated desires. The farmer wanted to know how much land...
...from the Basement. In all-Negro Douglas High School, one of Marshall's uncles gave him an A in algebra, but in grammar school he was repeatedly punished for breaking rules. Day after day, the principal sentenced Marshall to the basement, and allowed him to leave only when he had learned a section of the U.S. Constitution. "Before I left that school" he says, "I knew the whole thing by heart." He does not contend that the seeds of his career sprouted in the basement, but such discipline did reinforce a respect for authority, which he retains in uneasy...
Green Apple. Of the brothers, Walter was the smallest (now 5 ft. 8½ in.) and the least brilliant in school. He flunked English and algebra. At 16, he quit to become an apprentice machinist at Wheeling Steel (11? an hour). In 1927 he went to Detroit to make big money...
...that BLS report was still in their minds." High-school training is another cause of the shortage. Training in the sciences and higher mathematics should begin no later than the junior year in high school. But in the last 50 years, the proportion of high-school students studying algebra has dropped from 50% to 20%, physics from 20% to 4%. Says University of Illinois Engineering Dean William Everitt: "We can't teach these boys algebra and geometry or primary physics and chemistry in the colleges." Today M.I.T. reckons one in four of its freshman engineering students to be poorly...
Covering elementary and intermediate calculus, differential equations, analytical geometry, and higher algebra, the examination was graded not only on correct answers, but also on the originality and brevity of the solutions...