The following lesson comes from the wonderful minds of Marilyn Burns and Marthal Hairston in their book, THE I HATE MATHEMATICS BOOK. This book gets our highest recommendation. It can change your entire outlook on the subject of math.

Read it, then we dare you to TRY IT OUT
using your calculator.  (Click HERE if you
need to learn how to get a calculator on your computer.)

How much do you have on the 8th day?

What about the 10th day?

At the end of two weeks you will have .

By the 20th day you are making .

On the 30th day of the month you make .

There is a definite mathematical pattern here.  Do you see it in the cartoon?

Think for a while and then click HERE to see if you guessed right.

PATTERN:

The chart is growing by powers of two!  Let me show you:

DAY1 ................2 cents....................=2 to the first power or 2^1

DAY2.................4 cents....................=2 to the second power or 2^2

DAY3.................8 cents....................=2 to the third power or 2^3

etc.

So you see the exponent corresponds to the day of the month!

To find what you will earn on the 15th day of the month, just type
2^15 = into your calculator.

You will get 32768.  Now remember, this is PENNIES.  To write this in dollar
notation, we need to divide by 100, or simply move the decimal from
the end of the number over to the left 2 spots.
This gives us $327.68

Exponents represent a VERY POWERFUL form of multiplication.

They make things get large quickly.

ASSIGNMENT:
Click HERE to go to the GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES exercise

This book is a true keeper!

Copyright © 1999-2020 themathlab.com