Japan is one of the
most high tech nations in the world, yet even so a million Japanese children a
year learn to calculate using a mechanical, pocket-sized contraption that has
been around for millennia.
The abacus, which the
Japanese call soroban, is an ancient device made up of parallel
rods, each containing five beads each.
Once mastered, it enables you to add, multiply, subtract and divide much
faster than you can with a paper and pencil – and often almost as quickly as an
electronic calculator, as the clip below shows.
(It's pretty
impressive. The girl is adding five numbers, each between a billion and ten
trillion, as fast as the numbers are read out.)
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