Customer Reviews

How to Calculate Quickly: Full Course in Speed Arithmetic

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I gave it a five star simply because the books is simple and very effective at getting you to learn the "art" of quick calculation.

I looked at all the others in that field. Most of them teach you tricks for quick calculation. To do certain calculation you need to remember the tricks. There are dozen of them and you just get confused. This book do not used trick but teach you "number sense" ... and how to calculate from left to right with complex number. Beleive me, I was affraid of that kind of calculation and with that book I learned a lot!

I used it because I am preparing for interviews in management consulting. Case study need you to do lots of quick mental calculation. I am very good with complex calculation but mental arithmetics is something else.

BUY THIS BOOK ... very slim, but as said before, lots lots of exercise well made and improving in difficulty ... cant say more, its the book I was looking for.

Amusing, it was first published in 1945 ...

and keep going back to it. It is important that a prospective buyer knows this book focuses on MENTAL arithmetic, i.e., no paper. If that is an interest of yours, then this is your book. If you are interested in "shortcuts", there are other books out there (though the last chapter of this book contains some of the more popular ones.) Don't think you can multiply two two-digit numbers in your head? you may be surprised.

Long collection of exercises to improve your mental calculating ability. This book will keep you busy for quite a while. It's slim but there's a lot of exercises in it. It will give you eough familiarity with numbers to do fairly large multiplication and division (let alone addition and subtraction) in your head. Fractions included. Requires no advanced math skills of any sort. Presupposes a knowledge of basic caluculation, that's it. No algebra, geometry etc.

Being fairly proficient in "mental math", I picked up this book to see if there were any useful techniques for calculating. I was very disappointed.

The author's approach seems to rely primarily on rote memorization and optimizing pencil & paper methods. This is fine if you have pencil & paper handy, but cumbersome if you want to "run a rapid mental check..." as they suggest in their book. Rather than provide new techniques that work for mental computation, the reader is asked to perform endless drills to allow you to mentally perform pen & paper methods.

Another problem is the reliance on memorizing special cases instead of focusing on general-use techniques. If it takes a person 10 seconds to determine which of the dozens of special cases applies to a particular problem, then he does not know "how to calculate quickly"

For example, one of the author's special cases, "Multiplying a Sum by a Difference," actually has a very broad use for multiplying any two integers, but it is presented only briefly as a very narrow application that you will likely never stumble across in real life (e.g. multiplying two integers whose units add to 10 and the tens have a difference of 1)

Overall, the heavy reliance on rote vs. technique makes this an unsatisfying work.

A few years back, I had just started a job in payroll and was using a calculator to do things I really should have been able to do in my head. Quite frankly, this made me pretty terrible at that job. I had just figured I was not a "math person" with bad "number sense" and was not very long for that job without some help.

Lo and behold, a supervisor recommended this book when I expressed my concerns and willingness to do whatever it took to become better at my job. With a little work over the next month or so I proved myself entirely wrong at not being a "math person". There's no real magic to calculations in your head, but some techniques are better than others, especially for error-checking. A bit of hard work at drills and memorization can make you that much better. I stayed in the job for 3 more years and when I left I was one of the top people in a large office (200+) in terms of accuracy.

Provided you're not lazy and do the drills in the book, you'll increase your computation time after learning the practical tricks that bookkeepers have used for decades that the academy doesn't know and that your teachers never taught you in school (e.g. the division by 3 check, digit checks, adding from right to left, grouping tens, etc).

No academic jargon or nonsense or high-falutin theory. Just a regimen for improving your mental calculation speed designed for business. It's like exercise. It takes continuous work over time, and it's not always fun, but the results are worth it. Everything worth doing takes work, so beware of any "magic math systems" that instantly make you faster. There are no steroids when it comes to math.

If you're new in a payroll, bookkeeping or other field that requires fast mental calculation, an absolute must have.

I am just a simple college student. While browsing a used book store I picked up this book and for some reason couldn't help but buy it and bring it around with me.

This book was first published in 1945, but the art still remains the same. The author attempts to build your skill in quick calculations by bringing you series of exercises that practice vital techniques and skills needed to perform speed math. Each excercise introduces something new and are placed in a way that you will not get bored when practicing. The placement is also strategetic so you will learn one new skill at a time. There are about 15000 possible questions if you wish to do them all.

Also, the book is pocket sized and can be brought anywhere. I find myself bringing it out any time I have to wait around. An excersize can be knocked out in a couple of minutes and I have learned something new! It is also entertaining when I am bored. I also find that doing excercises keeps my mind active and less sluggish during the day.

The book is straight to the point. You know exactly what you are learning and why you are learning it.

Full disclosure: I do not think speed arithmetic is an especially useful skill now that calculators and computers are everywhere.

This being said, I feel it is extremely important to understand arithmetic. This book does exactly that.

I tutored a number of high school kids who hated math class, and it was often difficult to get them interested in anything. I used this book (the beginning, with addition and subtraction mostly) as a "cool off" for when we were done with a more difficult topic but didn't have time to move on to something else. The students enjoyed this because, as one of my students noted, "It's just adding. It's easy." To share a notable, before using this book, one of my students took one minute and forty seconds to add together numbers in the first exercise of this book (which is something like adding six or so digits together) and she was using her fingers to do so. After three months of learning about grouping, doing a bunch of the practice additions (we raced to see who was faster at it!), she was adding together twelve 3-digit numbers (as are in the exercises in this book) with her fastest time being fifty seconds. Needless to say, this was an extreme improvement. Her algebra got correspondingly better (I'd say due to her newfound confidence in math) and she was even excited to begin Algebra II.

If this story doesn't tug at your heartstrings, then maybe you will just enjoy the book for its little tips and tricks: I re-learned grouping for addition and left-to-right subtraction (which I use to this day and which I feel is much faster and easier to do than right-to-left subtraction) and some nice multiplication tricks. Suffice it to say that this book was more than worth it.

My brain would lock up when it came to Mathematics.
Not anymore! The book simply erased Math Anxiety for me.
Thank you very much!

Sure wish someone had taught me this method earlier in life. If used and applied does increase arithmetic speed. Works.

I received the item within a couple of days, and the quality of the item matched my expectations.