If you wanted to graduate from the eighth grade in an Oregon school in 1911, you would have had to answer questions like this:
From Portland to Salem it’s 52 miles. If the weight of a single rail averages 80 pounds per yard, how many tons of steel in the track from Portland to Salem?
Pretty elementary, right? But that was one of the easier questions in the arithmetic part of Oregon’s eighth grade graduation quiz 115 years ago. The rest of the test covered operations of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions and decimals, plus percentages…