Young Pythagoras can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Every time he tries to help, people get angry. What’s a curious kid to do? On a trip to Egypt, Pythagoras’ curiosity helps him discover the secret of the right triangle. A clever introduction to the Pythagorean Theorem.
The story imagines how Pythagoras, as a young boy, might have discovered the theorem through a series of everyday situations, and how he applied his knowledge of the theorem to try to solve real world problems.
Long ago in India, there lived a raja who believed that he was wise and fair. But every year he kept nearly all of the people’s rice for himself. Then when famine came, the raja refused to share the rice, and the people went hungry.
Then a village girl named Rani devises a clever plan. She does a good deed for the raja, and in return the raja lets her choose her reward. Rani asks for just one grain of rice, doubled every day for thirty days. Through the surprising power of doubling, one grain of rice grows into more than one billion grains of rice.
If someone handed you a big bowl of jelly beans, how would you figure out how many there are? You could count them, one by one―or you could estimate. Do you see more than five jelly beans? Less than a million?
We use estimation in Math when the exact answer to a problem is not required. The said problem can be resolved with an approximately realistic value. Estimating also helps us get the answer to a calculation faster.
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