Without a Calculator, Can You Do This in 12 seconds?
Find The Value in Two Steps
Mathematics can be fun!
Your proficiency in solving mathematical problems depends largely on how much you practice.
You might be tempted to grab your calculator and save yourself the stress of doing this mentally. But hold on! Your brain needs some exercise. Let’s give it a little stretch with this problem. 😅
You may also want to calculate the squares of 999 and 998 manually, and then find their difference. But that would be a lot of unnecessary work!
Let’s do this together!
Feel free to give this a shot if you think you can crack it without using a calculator. I’d love to see your approach in the comments. If you get it right, high five! If not, don’t sweat it — just follow along.
Are you ready? Let’s dive in!
When you see the squares of two numbers with one being subtracted from the other, what comes to your mind first?
If you think about the concept of the “Difference of two squares”, high-five! ✋.
This is all we have to do in this problem and get it done in 12 seconds or even less. If you have a quicker approach, I’d love to see it! Please drop it in the comments.
How well do you know this:
This is the concept of the “Difference of two squares”!
Let us apply this in solving the challenge we have today.
In this case, our a is 999 and b is 998. If we make the substitutions, we would have this:
Interesting! 😃
This gives us:
There we go! The answer is 1997. 😊
Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this puzzle.
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