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Skill 5 of 15
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# Square root

6 apples in one bag. We need many, so we’ll take six bags each:

$$6\cdot 6=6^2=36$$

At home, when your family says ‘that’s a lot of apples. How many were there in a bag?’ then you can maybe not remember the number. But you do remember that it was something squared! ‘Some number’ squared gives 36 apples. If we symbolise this ‘some number’ with a letter, say $x$ for now, then we are looking for this unknown $x$, which squared gives 36 apples:

$$x^2=36$$

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References:

1. Encyclopædia Britannica’ (encyclopedia), www.britannica.com
2. A History of Mathematical Notations (Dover Books on Mathematics)’ (book), Florian Cajori, Dover Publications, 1st ed., 2011, www.amazon.com/dp/0486677664, ISBN 9780486677668
3. Online Etymology Dictionary’ (dictionary), Douglas Harper, www.etymonline.com
4. Measuring Compute performance of your system using Flops’ (web page), Akash Belekar, Tech4Gizmos, 2015, www.tech4gizmos.com/compute-performance-of-your-system (accessed Oct. 4th, 2019)