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It had been a long evening, sagging under the huge amount of maths homework Felix had struggled with before going to bed. But night had come, as usual, and Feilx had succumbed to the dark mothering hand of sleep, glad to forget about maths for a while. In the middle of the night, Felix suddenly woke up. The moonlight had thrown a gauzy film across everything, but it was still possible to see a tall, bluish figure by the desk at the other end of his bedroom. At first Felix was afraid, but for some reason he felt calm and unthreatened. He had always thought that, just because something or somebody is different, it does not necessarily follow that they are bad. The bluish figure had two large watery eyes. Its two long arms were each topped off with one throbbing blue finger. It just had to be an alien - even his older brother would never go out looking as odd as that! The blue alien was stroking the keys of Felix's calculator, peering at its display with one eye whilst poring over Felix's scribbled maths homework with the other eye. Then, the alien, with one almost silent kangaroo jump, landed beside Felix's bed. Felix shut his eyes tight, pretending to be asleep. He felt the alien stroking the hand Felix had on the pillow, and heard a soft gurgliing noise emanating from the alien's stomache area. Felix noted how cold and leathery the alien's finger felt, like the skin of a toad. After a few minutes, the alien jumped to Felix's window, opened it, and was gone. Somehow, it also managed to close the window behind it. Perhaps people on the blue alien planet were extra, extra polite. Silence once again spun itself softly around Felix. He felt strangely sorry for the blue alien. If it had only two fingers, how could it put its clothes on in the morning, or eat its dinner, or even count? Suddently, a giggling strawberry-jelly idea began hopping around in Felix's mind. Felix sat up in bed, and added 1+1 on his fingers. off course he got two, but what would the alien get? Well, obviously, if five of them stood in a line, and added up using their combined fingers, they would get the same as Felix. But what if one of the aliens tried to do it on their own? Well, thought Felix, humans count in 10s because they have ten fingers, so we have
TENS UNITS TWOS UNITS
0 1 0 1
+ 0 1 + 0 1
= 0 2 whereas the aliens must have 1 0
So on their plainet, 1+1=10! Felix was very excited, and couldn't wait to tell his maths teacher at school tomorrow how wrong she had been all these years. He floated off into a honeyed sleep, where he dreamt of a yellow alien with one enormous bleary eye and one spidery arm with multiple elbows and three stodgy fingers, who insisted that 2+2=11.
NOTE: For the 3-fingered alien, THREES UNITS
0 2
+ 0 2
= 1 1
