--- title: A staircase of cubes and handshakes — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «A staircase of cubes and handshakes», a lesson of the lessons course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A staircase of 4 steps built of cubes has 1, 2, 3 and 4 cubes in its steps: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 cubes. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/lessons/130-staircase-and-handshakes/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Lessons](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/lessons/) / A staircase of cubes and handshakes # A staircase of cubes and handshakes Lesson 130 of the lessons course of Mova's primary school: 3 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/lessons/130-staircase-and-handshakes/0/) — A staircase of 4 steps built of cubes has 1, 2, 3 and 4 cubes in its steps: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 cubes. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/lessons/130-staircase-and-handshakes/1/) — The same sum counts handshakes: of 5 children, the first shakes hands with 4 others, the next with 3 new ones, then 2, then 1, so 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/lessons/130-staircase-and-handshakes/2/) — Pair the numbers from both ends to add fast: 1 + 4 = 5 and 2 + 3 = 5. - ← previous: [Sisters and brothers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/lessons/129-sisters-and-brothers/) - next →: [The times table in stories](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/lessons/131-times-table-stories/) - ↑ back to [Lessons](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/lessons/)