It Was the Best of "Times" Trivia Quiz

Answer: One thousand

Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are all operations--they are ways you can combine number values to get a different number value. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division together are usually called the basic operations.

One thousand is simply a number; it can't "do" anything to change its value.

Answer: Sum

The terms product, times, and the word "of" are all very common words that mean to multiply. "Sum" means addition.

Answer: 1

Any number that is multiplied by 1 will stay exactly the same. 0 is another number that has a multiplication property--0 multiplied by any number changes its value to 0.

Answer: An equals sign (=)

An equals symbol, =, means "equal to" or "the same as." The other symbols can all mean multiplication.

Students often learn to use an x for multiplication when they are first learning the subject. Later on, however, we replace the x with a dot or the "next to" notation, because an unknown value is often called x. It would be confusing if students had to write "3xx" to mean "3 times x!"

Answer: 4 + 4 + 4 + 4

One trick that students often use when learning to multiply is that, for example, "3 times 4" is the same as "3 four times" or even "4 three times." Multiplying can make the process of addition much easier, especially if you're using numbers much larger than 3 or 4!

Answer: To breed or produce offspring, as animals

When animals like rabbits or other living things breed quickly, they are said to multiply.

Answer: Division

Division is the operation used to "undo" multiplication. In mathematics, multiplication and division are called inverses because they share this property. If you aren't familiar with exponents or squaring yet, it's a useful operation that involves multiplying a number by itself a number of times.

Answer: True

Multiplication is often used to do the sum of many numbers very quickly. There is a legend about mathematician Karl Gauss that, at a very young age (probably 7 or 8), he amazed his teacher by using multiplication to quickly add the numbers 1 to 100. He would have done this by pairing them into sums of 101 (for example, 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101, and so on) and then noticing that there would be exactly 50 pairs of numbers. So instead of adding, you could multiply 101 by 50 to find the sum (5050) much more quickly. There are many other situations in which you could use multiplication to greatly speed up a math problem.

It's a very useful operation.

Answer: Finding the area of a rectangle

Multiplication is nearly always the best method for finding the area of any shape. Washing the dishes doesn't use math at all, which may be why people don't enjoy it so much.

Answer: 3 plus some number equals 10

Setting up problems in this way (finding "some number" or "some value") is what algebra is all about. Usually in algebra, we use a letter, like n or x, to stand for the term "some number" so that we don't have to write it over and over.