The Late Latin word decēnus came into our language as a decade. This is what a set made up of ten elements or units is called .
For example: “The explosion caused by a gas leak caused a dozen injuries”, “The municipal government announced a project to restore a dozen historic buildings in the old part of the city”, “Last night with Claudio we ate a dozen sandwiches while we watched the game”.
If a person walks into a bakery and asks for ten baguettes, the baker will give him ten units of these loaves. In the same way, if someone enters a stationery or bookstore and asks the seller for a dozen envelopes, the worker will give him ten envelopes.
A ten is a set made up of ten units.
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Inaccurate use of the concept of ten
The idea of ten is sometimes used imprecisely or as a reference. The host of a newscast can indicate on TV that a terrorist attack left more than a dozen fatalities as a balance. The expression alludes to the fact that it has already been confirmed that at least eleven people lost their lives. However, the exact number of dead is not yet known.
A mother, on the other hand, may say to her son, “I asked you a dozen times to tidy up your room and you still haven’t!” . The woman may not have given her son the order ten times, or perhaps she doesn’t even remember the number of times she asked the same thing. But the use of the term ten makes it possible to emphasize that it is an order repeated on many occasions.
If a dozen (12) eggs have only two whites, it can be said that there are ten (10) colored eggs in that box.
Term in mathematics
In the field of mathematics, more specifically in the branch of arithmetic (also known as number theory ), we also speak of ten to indicate the digit that in a number in the decimal system represents quantities equal to or greater than ten and less than a hundred. If we take the number 324, for example, we can say that the 3 represents the hundred, the 2, the ten, and the 4 is the unit.
One of the advantages of using these concepts is the possibility of grouping very large amounts and expressing them more clearly. If we could simply make use of the concept of unit to represent numbers, in the previous case we should say that we are dealing with three hundred and twenty-four units; this would be very difficult to manipulate to perform certain calculations, both simple and complex, and that is why it is convenient for us to break it down into different sets.
The ten in the sums
When doing a sum, we may be faced with the need to move a group of ten units to the tens column to continue, and then it may happen that we must do the same thing but starting from the tens to the hundreds, and so on. until there are no more remains.
Let’s see a practical example to understand this mechanic and its benefits when adding two numbers:
* to solve the operation 74 + 58, we start with the units column. 4 + 8 equals 12, a number that can be broken down into a ten and two ones ;
* in the space for the result, therefore, we write a 2 and “pass” the 1 to the tens column, where we must add it to the 7 and 8 ;
* once again, the result in this column exceeds the allowed limit (single digit), since it is 13. In this case, we must interpret the number as one hundred and three tens, so we put a 3 in the result and carry the 1 to the next column, where it will remain intact since both addends were less than 100. For this reason, we can write it directly to the total result of the addition, which is 132.
