A tree fell and was broken into 4 pieces, 13-1/6 feet, 10-3/7 feet, 8-1/2 feet, and 7-16/21 feet long. How tall was the tree? Annie's father gave her 20 apples to divide among her friends. She gave each one 2-2/9 apples apiece. How many playmates had she? John had 17-2/5 apples. He divided his whole apples into fifths. How many pieces had he in all? A landlady has 3-3/7 pies to be divided among her 8 boarders. How much will each boarder receive? There are twenty columns of spelling words in Mary's lesson and 16 words in each column. How many words are in her lesson? There are 9 nuts in a pint. How many pints in a pile of 5,888,673 nuts? The Adams school contains eight rooms; each room contains 48 pupils; if each pupil has eight cents, how much have they together? A pile of wood in the form of a cube contains 15-1/2 cords. What are the dimensions to the nearest inch? A man 6 ft. high weighs 175 lb. How tall is his wife who is of similar build, and weighs 125 lb.? A stick of timber is in the shape of the frustum of a square pyramid, the lower base being 22 in. square and the upper 14 in. square. How many cubic feet in the log, if it is 22 ft. long? Mr. Ames, being asked his age, replied: "If you cube one half of my age and add 41,472 to the result, the sum will be one half the cube of my age. How old am I?" [1] The following and later problems are taken from actual textbooks or courses of study or state examinations; to avoid invidious comparisons, they are not exact quotations, but are equivalents in principle and form, as stated in the preface. These samples, just given, of the kind of problem-solving that should not be emphasized in school training refer in some cases to books of forty years back, but the following represent the results of a collection made in 1910 from books then in excellent repute. It required only about an hour to collect them; and I am confident that a thousand such problems describing situations that the pupil will never encounter in real life, or putting questions that he will never be asked in real life, could easily be found in any ten textbooks of the decade from 1900 to 1910. If there are 250 kernels of corn on one ear, how many are there on 24 ears of corn the same size? Maud is four times as old as her sister, who is 4 years old. What is the sum of their ages? If the first century began with the year 1, with what year does it end? Every spider has 8 compound eyes. How many eyes have 21 spiders? A nail 4 inches long is driven through a board so that it projects 1.695 inches on one side and 1.428 on the other. How thick is the board? Find the perimeter of an envelope 5 in. by 3-1/4 in. How many minutes in 5/9 of 9/4 of an hour? Mrs. Knox is 3/4 as old as Mr. Knox, who is 48 years old. Their son Edward is 4/9 as old as his mother. How old is Edward?