The Annual High School Mathematics Examination (AHSME) began as a local contest in New York City in 1950. By 1960, 150,000 students throughout the United States and Canada took the AHSME. The 1982 Examination was administered to 418,000 participants in the United States and Canada and to 20,000 students in various countries of other continents. In the United States and Canada, one use of AHSME is to select approximately one hundred participants in the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad, and the Olympiads are used in the selection of a student team to represent the United States in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Since the difficulty of problems appearing in the AHSME varies over a wide range, they are a valuable teaching aid for all high school students interested in mathematics.