The GRE Quantitative Reasoning Test: Arithmetic, List 1

Elementary schools by and large do manage to teach the basic algorithms for multiplication and division, addition and subtraction, as well as methods for handling fractions, decimals, and percentages. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

Without a positional notation system, arithmetic is tedious and hard, as schoolchildren learn when teachers force them to multiply or subtract with Roman numerals. 1491

When you try to calculate the slope of a tangent line, zero wrecks your approximation process. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

The job market remained strong despite the slowdown, as the Labor Department counted just 180,000 new unemployment claims, reflecting a decrease of 5,000 over the previous week’s revised level. Washington Post (Apr 28, 2022)

On a cosmic scale, the sun and the Voyager spacecraft are essentially the same distance from our nearest stellar neighbor. Scientific American (Nov 12, 2022)

A couple of brief multiplications, a simple division, and, bingo, you know your gravitational position wherever you go. A Short History of Nearly Everything

The euro is nearly equal to the dollar. Washington Post (Jul 13, 2022)

Recirculating tanks require huge amounts of energy to move and filter millions of gallons of water daily, and that water still holds waste that can pollute nearby rivers and estuaries. Scientific American (May 7, 2022)

Since the beginning of the eruption, the new underwater volcano has grown to a height of around 820 meter in a place where there was hardly any elevation before. Scientific American (Oct 18, 2021)

The Northeast has seen an increase of more than 50% in the heaviest precipitation events in recent decades, the largest increase of any region of the U.S. Scientific American (Nov 21, 2022)

In quantum mechanics, the shortest conceivable length in nature is 10⁻³³ centimeters, the so-called Planck length. New York Times (Nov 30, 2022)

The smaller stars with lower masses live much longer, so we find them at every age, and they tend to be cooler and redder. Scientific American (Dec 1, 2022)

Measuring a property of one particle — its direction of spin, say — would instantaneously affect the measurement of its mate. New York Times (Oct 10, 2022)

One obvious example of massive growth is the blue whale, which can reach colossal lengths of up to 30 meters at maturity. Scientific American (Sep 29, 2022)

In World War II, an extraordinary calculating machine commissioned by the U.S. military, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, could, each second, perform around 350 multiplications or 5,000 simple additions. A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

By about 2030, if the trend persists, Earth time will overtake atomic time by about a second — so metrologists will have to insert a negative leap second to keep the two time scales in sync. New York Times (Nov 14, 2022)

In a sense these infinitesimals were infinitely small, smaller than any positive number you could name, yet still somehow greater than zero. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Having no fixed shape and no set boundary, an infinity puzzle can be assembled and reassembled in numerous ways, seemingly ad infinitum. New York Times (Dec 9, 2022)

New research suggests these busybodies of the insect world are capable of addition and subtraction—using colors in the place of plus and minus symbols. Science Magazine (Feb 6, 2019)

Later observations revealed that the brown dwarf is about the same width as Jupiter, with a diameter of nearly 129,000 kilometers, but much denser, with 70 times as much mass. Scientific American (Aug 16, 2021)