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During my trip, I became fascinated with unrecognized countries. These are countries that exist in the sense that you can visit them; however, they are not members of the United Nations, as certain countries do not recognize their existence. One of these countries is known as Transnistria, or its official name the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. Transnistria is a thin strip of land wedged between Moldova and Ukraine with its own government, army, and currency. It declared independence from Moldova in the early 1990s, though this declaration was self-proclaimed and not accepted by other countries.
The reasons that Transnistria broke away are complicated, but the basic gist was that there were many Russians and Russian speakers in Transnistria when it broke away from the Soviet Union. Moldova then decided to become more like its neighbor Romania by doing things like dropping the Cyrillic alphabet and switching to the Romanian language, many people in Transnistria didn't want to lose their culture, and this led to the desire to become independent.
I visited the capital city Tiraspol, and a Russian friend who was traveling with me said that it felt like how Russia was twenty years earlier during the Soviet Era. In fact, the national flag featured a hammer and sickle, one of the main roads was called Lenin Street, and there was a huge statue of Lenin in the city center. It felt like a city that was never told that the Soviet Union had collapsed!
At one point, we wandered into a bookstore. And in addition to magnets with Putin's photo, we saw that each cashier station had an abacus! How very retro! This of course piqued my interest because I had never seen an abacus outside of a mathematics classroom. I took a few photos and was originally confused because the photos looked different from the ones I saw online, but then I quickly found out that there were different types of abacuses, and the ones in the bookstore were of course Russian abacuses.
A Russian abacus has twelve rows of beads, and each row has ten beads except for a single row that has four beads. Let's talk about the rows above the row with four beads:
- The first row above the row with four beads is the ones place, and each of these beads has a value of 1.
- The next row up is the tens place, and each of these beads has a value of 10.
- The next row is the hundreds place, then the thousands place, etc.
- The rows below the row with four beads are the tenths place, the hundredths place, and the thousandths place.
- Finally, each bead in the row of four beads is a quarter. This is done because many things cost a quarter, and it makes things simpler to have a row representing quarters.
The beads typically start on the right, and they are moved to the left to represent value. So the value represented on the abacus here is 3 x 1 + 1 x 10 + 2 x 100 = 213 Transnistrian rubles, or approximately $13.
Sample Problems
Sample Problems
1. What is the value of one bead in the very top row?
2. What would be the total value if all of the beads were pushed to the left. Be careful and don't forget about the quarters!
3. Look up other types of abacuses - specifically the Chinese and Japanese abacuses - and compare them. How are numbers represented differently on each type?
4. Research ways that abacuses can be used to perform simple arithmetic. Are these methods easier or harder than doing calculations by pencil and paper?
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