The Best Arithmetic Books for Beginners

Lots of area, perimeter, volume, and surface area practice problems with an answer key. Area and perimeter problems can be completed by younger students. The book progresses to more advanced problems including volume, surface area, and multi-step challenge questions. A perfect workbook for those trying to learn geometry. A book that can grow with students as their skills develop.

Surprise yourself and others with your ability to perform difficult calculations in your head. Often wrongly attributed to innate talent, mental arithmetic is rooted in sound methods tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of the human brain. Those methods, and the will to apply yourself diligently, will enable you to master mental calculation.

Practical Mental Arithmetic offers the only complete course covering everything from addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to powers, roots, logarithms, exponentials, trigonometric functions, units of measurement, and the calendar, using integers, fractions, decimals, and negative numbers. After a brief but thorough review of conventional arithmetic, the book proceeds systematically from simpler to more complex operations, with examples that show how to perform even difficult calculations mentally. Streamlined methods reduce the demands on the memory, and a practical technique for remembering numbers facilitates digit-intensive calculations. Although shortcuts are presented, the focus is on methods of broad application, not the gimmicks that dominate the literature on mental arithmetic. Amusing historical references and startling insights into mathematics add to the enjoyment of achieving rapid success with challenging calculations that most people could not perform even on paper. Readers of all levels, from beginners to mathematicians, can profit from the methods taught in this book. With practice, they can achieve astonishing skill in mental arithmetic—and have fun doing so.

The farther we get from our grade school days, the easier it is to forget those operations and nuances of arithmetical computation that keep recurring in our daily lives: interest and discount problems, time-payment calculations, tax problems, and so on. This handy book is designed to streamline your methods and resharpen your calculation skills for a variety of situations. Starting with the most elementary operations, the book goes on to cover all basic topics and processes of arithmetic: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, percentage, interest, ratio and proportion, denominate numbers, averages, etc.

The text continues into other useful matters, such as powers and roots, logarithms, positive and negative numbers, harmonic progression, and introductory concepts of algebra. Entirely practical in approach and using an easy-to-follow question and answer style, this book covers a wide range of common knotty areas: filling and emptying receptacles, scales for models and maps, business and financial calculations (partial payment problems, compound interest, bank and sales discount, profit and loss problems, etc.), angle measurement, mixtures and solutions, graph and chart problems, and the like. The discussion contains numerous alternate and short-cut methods, such as quick ways to figure compound interest; to square a number from 1 to 100; to divide by 5, 25, 125, 99, etc.; to multiply two 2-digit numbers having the same figure in the tens place; and many more. These valuable tips, together with the huge fund of exercise problems (a total of 809, half of them answered in an appendix), help you to increase your computational proficiency and speed, and make this an extremely useful volume to have on your shelf at home or at work. Anyone who has to do any figuring at all — housewife, merchant, student — will profit from this refresher. Parents will find it an excellent source of material for helping children in school work.