Tay, Eng Guan

Steen (1999) stated that 'quantitative literacy - or numeracy, as it is known in British English - means different things to different people'. He then proposed that quantitative literacy is both more than and different from mathematics - at least as mathematics has traditionally been viewed by school and society.

Posing good problems is important for learning, teaching and research in mathematics. In this paper, the converse problem posing strategy is applied to Gauss's method that has been used to obtain the summation formula of an Arithmetic Progression. The work here serves as a simple but typical example to demonstrate the use of this strategy. The results obtained may also help the reader see to what extent Gauss's method can be applied, thus enriching one's understanding of this famous method.