How Fast can you Think?

Absolutely Mental 1
Written by Rowland Morgan

Illustrations by Mike Phillips
Published by Scholastic India Pvt. Ltd.

Do you have what it takes to keep your head when it really counts? This puzzle book by Rowland Morgan will indeed help you discover that. A puzzle book with a difference, it is bound to appeal to the pre-teens and above – including adults!

Absolutely Mental 1 tests that quality, known as mental agility. Mental agility helps not just in making very quick calculations, but also in testing simple logic and intelligence.

One sample puzzle:

You are in a private jet flying at 600 kilometres an hour, 10,000 meters above the ground. The pilot has suffered a fatal heart attack and you have been ordered to fly the plane. Through the windscreen you see a mountain, only a kilometre away and approaching fast. The passengers’ lives are in your hands. How much time do you have to avoid a fatal head-on collision?

Though some of the puzzles require quick mathematical calculations, several of them do not. The main idea behind the puzzle book, as the above excerpt demonstrates, is to see how you catch on to a situation and reason out logically.

The book explains that in pre-historic times, before things started getting written, several things were handed down by memory. This holds true even for numbers and calculations. However, when they did finally started getting written, ‘they (humans) invented crutches to support their brains.’

The book encourages you to throw the crutches away and think on your own. The puzzles are in the form of interesting stories and that in itself, is an incentive to read them. In this age when even little school children carry calculators, the book performs a very important function – it stresses on the need for children to think once again.

311 words | 3 minutes
Readability: Grade 7 (12-13 year old children)
Based on Flesch–Kincaid readability scores

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