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Chapter 1
Spelling
Sue was very excited to be at Wayside School in Mrs. Jewls’s class! She was surrounded by all the kids she had read about in her favorite book, Sideways Stories from Wayside School. She sat next to Rondi, who really was missing her two front teeth, just like it said in the book.
“Everyone take out your spelling books,” said Mrs. Jewls. “It’s time for arithmetic.”
“Huh?” said Sue. She didn’t know why you’d need spelling books to do arithmetic.
Mrs. Jewls wrote the first problem on the blackboard.
PROBLEM 1
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“How much is elf plus elf?” asked Mrs. Jewls.
They all picked up their pencils and busily tried to figure out the answer. Allison raised her hand.
“Yes, Allison,” said Mrs. Jewls.
“Fool!” Allison declared.
Mrs. Jewls smiled. “Very good,” she said and she wrote the answer on the blackboard under the problem.
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g
“How foolish,” said Sue.
Yet it wasn’t foolish at all. Each letter in the above problem represents a different number between 0 and 9. The letters remain constant within the problem. For example, if f represented the number 8, then every f in the problem would be replaced by the number 8. But f isn’t 8. Can you figure out what number each letter represents?
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e = ?llllf = ?lllll = ?llllo = ?
g
An explanation of how to solve this type of problem follows.
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Explanation
You don’t start at the top. You don’t start at the bottom. You have to look at the whole problem altogether. Then, like a detective, you search for clues.
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g
The clue to the first problem is the letter f in fool.
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g
Ignoring the first two columns for now, you see that:
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g
Therefore f has to represent the number 1. When adding two numbers, the only number you can ever carry is the number 1. You now replace all the f’s in the problem with the number 1.
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g
Since there are both letters and numbers, be careful that you don’t confuse the number 1 with the letter I, or the number 0 with the letter o. Now, looking at the first column you see that:
