Why bring the elephants if we want to tell how many of them we have seen last week? We can capture the quantity of the elephants using apples as counting tokens. Or we can use elephants to capture the quantity of the apple seeds.

During the season, we can match every hurricane to a counting token. Later, then the hurricanes are long gone, we will have their quantity captured.

A line of tokens is good for capturing quantities: We can instantly compare them.

If the bars are not growing smoothly, your computer may be busy doing something else.