Find the sum of the first 500 counting numbers?

Answer 1

I think you asking what is 1 + 2 + .. 499 + 500.

There is a simple way to compute such sums-- Find the average of the numbers and multiply by the number of items in the list. Further the average is just the sum of the first plus the last number in the list, since all of the numbers differs by the same amount.

So, the average is (1+500)/2 and there are 500 number is the list, so the sum is

(501/2)* 500 = 250*501. [I use * to mean multiply.}