Texas Slim’s problem
Texas Slim, the leader of the bandit gang, rubbed his hands together
happily. He and his men had just robbed the Pecos bank. They had stolen
twenty-one thousand dollars I
“Okay, boys,” grinned Slim, “the seven of us will split this up fair and
square.”
“Hot dawg!” exclaimed Sagebrush Sam. “How much will that be fer each of
jis, Slim?”
“I don’t rightly know,” admitted Slim. “I’ll just start countin’ it out
and we’ll see. Okay, here’s a dollar fer Sagebrush Sam, and one fer
Deadeye Pete, and one fer the Sundown Kid, and one fer . . .”
An hour later, while Slim was still counting the money into seven piles,
the sheriff and his deputies rode up and captured the whole gang!
When we break a large number into smaller numbers, as Slim was doing, we
are dividing it. Slim was dividing twenty-one thousand into seven parts.
If he had finished counting all the money into seven piles, there would
have been three thousand dollars in each pile.
If poor Slim had gone to school, he’d have known how to do the kind of
arithmetic called division. It would have taken him only a few seconds
to figure out how much each of his men had coming. Then they wouldn’t
have been captured. But of course they shouldn’t have stolen the money
in the first place!
