Throughout school, I took what I have come to think of as a guess-and-test approach to math word problems. This was never the 'official' approach, so I eventually had to learn to dress my answers up to seem more official. But they were derived from guess-and-test. Simple example. There are two school buses, A and B. A has 18 more seats in it than B does. Together, they have 96 seats. Find the number of seats in each. Guess-and-test. Hmmm. Sixty is a nice round number lower than 96. Let us see if the big bus could have 60 seats. That would mean the small bus has 18 fewer seats than that. Hmmmm. 60 + 42 = 102 NOT 96. Okay, each bus has to have fewer seats than that. Let us guess that the big one has 55. Does that work? 55 + 37 = 92 NOT 96. Oops. But we do...