Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 11, 2025
For a time there existed in the minds of both Gerald and Sophia the remarkable notion that twelve thousand pounds represented the infinity of wealth, that this sum possessed special magical properties which rendered it insensible to the process of subtraction. It seemed impossible that twelve thousand pounds, while continually getting less, could ultimately quite disappear.
But my lady was inexorable, and took a girl who could neither read nor write, to make up for her alarm about the progress of education towards addition and subtraction; and afterwards, when the clergyman who was at Hanbury parish when I came there, had died, and the bishop had appointed another, and a younger man, in his stead, this was one of the points on which he and my lady did not agree.
The legend that twins may share a single soul has always seemed to me grotesque and unpoetic nonsense, a cruel and unnecessary notion too: a man is sufficiently imperfect without suffering this further subtraction from his potentialities.
An hour and a half afterwards I sent her the following letter, which I copied without addition or subtraction: "A quarter of an hour after I had sent off my letter, the village doctor came to tell me that my man had need of his treatment for a disease of a shameful nature which he had contracted quite recently.
After that, the exercises in addition, subtraction, and multiplication, were figured out with a pencil or chalk instead of being done by means of spades or diamonds. In those early days the doctor was almost as slow in coming to the front as was the schoolmaster.
The result of this in figures would be the subtraction of six million inhabitants and the addition of eight million others a transaction which need not unduly alarm the British Jingo, and at the same time might render defeat less galling to the German patriot.
When it came to Arithmetic, Tahuti was so far lucky that the number of rules he had to learn was very few. His master taught him addition and subtraction, and a very slow and clumsy form of multiplication; but he could not teach him division, for the very simple reason that he did not properly understand it himself.
Subtraction is accomplished only in the most concrete manner, E.G. if a man wished to take away eight from twenty-five, he would count out twenty-five of the objects in question, or of bits of leaf or stick, then push away eight and count up the remainder.
There is, of course, this difference between the two cases, that words and letters have been invented by a positive effort of humanity, while space arises automatically, as the remainder of a subtraction arises once the two numbers are posited.
Behind the mill door, and invisible to the mere wayfarer who did not visit the family, were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many of them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and ones into twos. These were the miller's private calculations.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking