MATH: We’re word folks here at The Era, and don’t find ourselves faced with questions like these very often — thankfully!

We got this message Wednesday from Sally Costik and our friends at The Bradford Landmark Society:

“A local woman donated two bags of really interesting old books to the Landmark this morning. One, called ‘The Complete Arithmetic, Oral and Written’ was published in 1874 by Daniel W. Fish and is filled with all sorts of arithmetic problems that the average high school student (back then) should be able to solve. The Landmark was having a great time trying to answer some of these questions and I thought I’d send you a few examples to see if Era readers could cypher them out. Spoiler alert — we couldn’t do the math without a computer!”

Yikes. Neither could we.

Here goes:

1. How many steps of 30 inches each must a person take in walking 24 miles?

2. 5000 bushels of oats in Ohio are equal to how many bushels in Connecticut, by weight? In New Jersey?

3. How long will it take one of the heavenly bodies to move through a sextant at the rate of 3’12” a minute?

4. What must be the width of a bin 12 ft. long and 10 ft. deep, to contain 900 bushels of shelled corn?

5. How many bricks, 8 inches x 4 inches x 2 inches will be required to build a wall 42 feet long, 24 feet high, and 16 1/2″ thick, laid in courses of mortar 1/4 of an inch thick?

6. How much is 5 lb. 9 oz. 14 wt. of gold dust worth at 75 cents a pwt? (PWT is pennyweight).

7. How many centals (100 weight) of barley in Connecticut are equivalent to 1500 bushels in Missouri?

8. A horse and wagon cost $360. The horse cost 2 1/2″ times as much as the wagon. Find the cost of the wagon.

9. How many gills in 3 pints?

10. How many barrels can be filled from 20 hogheads?

Sally said, “I hope your readers are better at arithmetic than we are. We’re still wondering what’s a henweigh?”

That sure gave us a laugh. We don’t have the answers, folks, so you are on your own.