Unknown
Bob Morris
Unknown
Jill Peters
Bob Morris
Suzanne Rose
Growth by Doubling
"Harry Goes Against the Grain" is the For Real Segment for "Double Trouble".
Summary[]
Harry wants to bet that he will win a chess game. His opponent—an unnamed smart-alec boy he’s babysitting – refuses to gamble. But the boy asks Harry which amount he would wager: five dollars, or a bunch of pennies – one on the first square of the chessboard, then double the number of pennies from square to square. When Harry says he’d bet dollars rather than pennies, the boy tells him “The Legend of the Grain of Rice.” In the story the king (played by Harry) forces a peasant (played by the boy) to accept a reward for a good deed he has done. The peasant requests a grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the next, and for each of the remaining squares, twice the number of grains on the square before it. Ultimately, the king owes the peasant 549,755,830,887 tons of rice. That’s enough to cover the surface of the earth twice!