In the King's Chessboard it, it showed exponential growth through the story of a wise man and a king.  The King wants to reward the servant for being a good servant but he doesn't want anything in return because he said serving is a reward itself. The king gets mad and wants the wise man to receive an award. After the wise man says, "Very well, I ask only this: tomorrow for the first square of your chessboard, give me one grain of rice; the next day for the second square, two grains of rice...."
The king is embarrassed because he can't figure out how much grain of rice he will be giving the man. The king uses a math genius to figure out if the rate of grain is correct. The final amount that was promised to the wise man was a lot and the king realized that it was impossible and asks if the wise man was happy with it. The wise man was satisfied the whole time but the king wanted to reward him so bad.

Shows exponent ion growth because at first the 64 chessboard starts off with just one grain of rice but by the ninth day the grain of rice grew to 256. Each day represented the growth because it kept doubling every day. This story really represents exponential growth because not one time did anything decrease everything increased.

I think literature in an effective way to teach math because math happens in every day life and there are different things that go on that can describe different concepts. It also makes you thing about what kind of math is going on with situations.