Adrian Chiles demonstrates a simple trick for the nine times table. Photograph: Adrian Chiles
Struggling with the nine times table? I have a failsafe method
Apparently, nines are the hardest to grasp for primary school children. If only they had learned how to cheat like me.
Maths was never my thing. I quite enjoyed it at O-level, to the extent that I chose to do it at A-level. As early as the first week of the A-level course, however, it became abundantly clear that the subject was quite beyond me. I simply could not make head or tail of what the teacher was on about.
Looking around at the rest of the class quietly getting on with it, I remember wondering if there had been some primer course over the summer that everyone but me had attended. I just did not get it. There did not seem to be any certainties any more, rarely anything so straightforward as a right or wrong answer. There were enough grey areas in my other subjects – English and history. From my maths I wanted certainty, objective truth, which as far as I could see was not part of it any more.
Where were the times tables, for example? I had nailed those good and proper at a very early age. In ascending order of difficulty I would rate them as follows: two, 10, five, 11, three, four, six, eight, seven and 12. You will notice that the nine times table does not feature on this list. Why? Well, I found it too easy. It was my speciality. But that is because I was cheating – or so it felt – as someone had showed me a quick trick with which to nail the nines.
For this reason, I was fascinated to read that in an analysis of times tables answers by primary school children, it was ones that involved the number nine that were most often wrong. They are not the only ones. When the then school standards minister Nick Gibb announced the rollout of national multiplication tests in 2018, he refused to attempt 8x9 on ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
What is the matter with everyone? Nines are easy! If you kind of cheat, like me.
What you do is this. Hold your hands up, palms facing you. If it is 8x9 you are interested in, just fold down the eighth digit from the left, which will be the middle finger of your right hand. Now count the number of digits still standing to the left of the one you have folded down. There will be seven. Now count the number still standing to the right of the one you have folded down. There will be two. And there is your answer: 8x9=72. And it works for every digit, right up to 10x9.
After that, admittedly, I am stumped. Thank God for calculators.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist.
