Basic numeracy skills as an indicator for autism? Seriously?
I didn’t say 365; I said 350 times. Referring to the number of words. I also didn’t say times 12 months of 30 days each divided by 2; I said 1 year divided by 2. Now why am I doing this? We got
- 350 words per day
- 365 days per year
- 6 months = 1 year / 2
and I want to know the number of words this person has learned in 6 months, so:
I hope you’re still with me thus far… if not, probably more an ADHD issue on your end rather than anything to do with autism.
No, I do mean “square” because multiplying the same number (i.e., squaring) is faster than multiplying two numbers that are not the same. Given that I have 350 and 365 my options are:
- 350^2 as my lower bound
- 365^2 as my upper bound
- 360^2 as more middle-ish
365 is out because both 360 and 350 allow me do drop the trailing zero for the next step. Even though 360 would be a closer estimate, I’ll go with 35 instead of 36, simply because it ends in a “5” which makes squaring super easy.
…and since I really wanted to do 350*350 and not just 35*35, I’ll add “00” to the end for 122,500 as the number of words per year. Still going for an estimate only, so make that 120k and divide that by 2 to get the number of words learned in 6 months.
Now, if you know what you’re doing… you just look at the claim of roughly 350 words per day and knowing that a year is 365 days… do the left hand side of 35^2, so just 3*4=12, half it for 6, and done… add back the precision by shifting the decimal point 4 to the right for 60,000
Pretty basic high school math if you ask me…