Hash Tables and Associative Arrays

If you want to get a book from the central library of the University of Karlsruhe, you have to order the book in advance. The library personnel fetch the book from the stacks and deliver it to a room with 100 shelves. You find your book on a shelf numbered with the last two digits of your library card. Why the last digits and not the leading digits? Probably because this distributes the books more evenly among the shelves. The library cards are numbered consecutively as students sign up, and the University of Karlsruhe was founded in 1825. Therefore, the students enrolled at the same time are likely to have the same leading digits in their card number, and only a few shelves would be in use if the leading digits were used.