I remember visiting a gold emporium in Singapore many years ago. There were gold bars, gold bangles, gold necklets – the place glowed. And there at the checkout a Chinese man deftly did the accounting on an abacus! The abacus is a simple counting mechanism. Beads slide on rods: the columns from right to left are ones, tens, hundreds, ... ; the top beads count for 5, the bottom beads for 1. Beads ‘count’ when they are pushed towards the central cross beam. So from right to left the photo shows 1, 70, 500, 3000, 60 000 giving a total of 63 571.
