How Old Would You Be If You Were Born in 1909?

I get this Google search question several times a month, but I got these two inquiries just today:

"how old would you be if you were born in 1909"

"how old would u be if your born in 1909"

Arithmetic is largely a matter of learning 'tricks' for manipulating numbers. One such trick is the idea of adding or subtracting 10 or 100 or 1000 to a number. It's pretty elementary. I don't know how old these people are who are asking this question, but they are old enough to type into Google. (And if a parent typed it for them, why didn't the parent teach them the math instead of teaching them to let Google do their thinking for them?) Maybe one of these people is an adult, who votes. Scary isn't it? Actually, only one comes from the US, the other was from UK. (So no smirking Jay.)

9+10 = 19 19+10 = 29 29+10 = 39 39+10 = 49 49+10 = 59

90+100 = 190 190+100 = 290 290+100 = 390 390+100 = 490 490+100 = 590

1909+100 = 2009 2009+100 = 2109 2109+100 = 2209 2209+100 = 2309 2309+100 = 2409

59-10 = 49 49-10 = 39 39-10 = 29 29-10 = 19 19-10 = 9

Once you learn the pattern, you can just do it automatically. While some people have a natural gift for math, others simply have to work harder to get these tricks, but they're just tricks. And when you learn them, suddenly it makes sense. Just the way that you have to know how to use a key to unlock a door. That's a trick someone has to teach you. Once you learn it, it's easy.

I'm not making fun of, or blaming these searchers, but I am concerned about the quality of education and even parental guidance these people got. Not knowing how to do such a simple calculation may be one of the reasons NPR reported today that researchers found that half of Americans couldn't round up $2000 in 30 days. [And NPR now lets us embed their pieces here on the blog. Thanks NPR! Click below to listen to the segment.]
Well, if you don't know simple math, how can you know how much you are spending compared to how much you are taking in? Maybe it's not just greed as many people have thought, maybe it's ignorance.

While some people are caught in minimum wage jobs and raising kids and may have had some health problem wipe out their savings, many, I would guess, just thought that their credit cards were instant money, or that housing prices would go up forever, or just bought way more than they could afford. And these people use the same level of thinking when they decide on things like health care policy.