Double

As a school child, a remarkable story that I learnt from A Hundred Thousands of Why was this:


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A warlock invented a kind of chess game for the king. The latter decided to give any reward that the former asked.

The warlock said, "My request is very simple. There are 64 squares on the chess board. Please put one grain of rice in the first square, then two grains in the second, and, to fill up each square, please put twice as many rice as the previous square. I shall be satisfied if you could fill up all the 64 squares with rice."

Surprisingly, the king could not reward the warlock. Why?

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Of course we now know why. As Albert Einstein said: The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.

But, many people only come to realize this very principle after putting all their savings on some growth stocks.

PS. For the calculation of the number of rice grain, there is a short cut and you don't really need an electronic calculator. The idea is simple: 2^10 equals 1024. In other words, for 10 squares, the number rises by around 1000-fold; for 20 squares, one-million-fold; and so forth.