Excerpt from Essentials of Arithmetic: Intermediate Book In the theory of the work the authors have no more sympathy with the idea that a pupil should be told to do a thing in a certain way, with no knowledge of why this way is the right one, than they have with the notion that he must explain every operation with all the care that a textbook writer would show. They believe that every process should be learned as a reasonable one, with an appeal to the pupil's understanding, and that thereafter it should become entirely mechanical; and in this way each operation has been presented in this book. As to the applications, the eflort has been to select the problems with reference to the life and interests of our people today. Groups of related problems are frequently given, and the isolated problems are, in general, typical of those which the pupil will need in the ordinary walks of life. The applications are more numerous than is usually the case in textbooks, but these applications are not permitted to exclude the abstract drill work without which no pupil has ever become a good computer. To balance adequately the abstract and the concrete, the drill work and the applied problem, the review work and the new material, has been one of the earnest endeavors of the authors in the preparation of this series. When a pupil reaches this stage, certain features needed in the pri mary grades become unnecessary. He is now quite as interested in the process itself as he would be if a fictitious concrete dress were given to it, and he is quite prepared to abandon the use of objects, except in such cases as the introduction to percentage and the theory of fractions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.