China’s ‘human abacuses’ get their sums right and beat mental agility challenge on national TV
- Schoolmates add up 100 three-digit numbers in 45 seconds, but some people think their number-crunching is ‘crazy’
Two Chinese school pupils made waves on national television with their mental arithmetic skills, adding up 100 three-digit numbers within 45 seconds.
Victorious schoolmates Wu Yaqi and Pan Yuying, both 11 and from central China, had the correct answers after random numbers were given to them one-by-one in the latest episode of Challenge the Impossible aired by state broadcaster CCTV on Sunday evening.
Beside the two schoolfriends, Ren Chao and Liu Hang – both aged 12 – stood on stage to meet the “challenge to both human hearing and calculation”, according to the show’s producers.
Chao and Hang did not manage to get the exact sum, but both had the first two digits of the calculation correct.
The four youngsters, winners in national or world competitions, used a calculation method based on the Chinese abacus, a device that was added to the World Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2013.
A tool that enabled centuries of Chinese mathematical practice, the abacus is a popular course for schoolchildren in Chinese-speaking regions and in South Korea and Japan.