The task most often used to examine later understandings of ordinality involve asking such questions as "Which is more: 6 oranges or 4 oranges." Not until age 4 or 5 years can children from middle class backgrounds solve these ordinality problems consistently correctly for the numbers from 1 to 9 (Siegler & Robinson, 1982). The greatest difficulty occurs with numbers that are relatively large and close together (e. g., 7 vs 8). Counting skills may be important in development of this ordinal knowledge as well as in arithmetic; the number that occurs later in the counting string is always the larger number, and it is easier to remember which number comes later when the numbers are far apart in the counting string.