#137 Tricky treaty
As my four children sorted their Halloween candy, all was fun and games until James, my youngest, said to another child, “Look! I got one more piece than you!”
It was the shot heard around the kitchen table. As they all compared their loot, there was a clamour of children’s voices:
“I’ve got two more pieces than you!”
“Hey! Why does she have three more than me?”
“At least I have four more pieces than you!”
“No fair! You’ve got five more than me!”
“Are you kidding?! You have six more than I do!”
I stopped this by seizing all the sweets and putting them into one big pile. I took three for myself (dad tax) and divided the rest evenly among the kids. Not everyone was happy about this, but that is parenting sometimes. Did James end up with more or less candy than he had at the beginning, and by how much?
Answer next week
#136 Narrowing the spectrum
Solution
The seven colours are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Of these, only red, green and indigo can be made from letters that occur in the names of the other colours. Of these three, red and green can be made from letters in the other two, so indigo must be Lise’s favourite.
Quick quiz #125
1 Which cells break down and absorb bone tissue?
2 How many digits are in Belphegor’s prime?
3 What did Pierre-François Bouchard discover in 1799?
4 Which NASA probe, launched in 1989, mapped more than 90 per cent of the surface of Venus?
5 Which of these animals doesn’t have the same name for its genus and its species: the common skunk, the Eurasian otter or the blue-footed booby?
Answers
1 Osteoclasts
2 31 – Belphegor’s prime is 1000000000000066600000000000001
3 The Rosetta Stone
4 Magellan
5 The blue-footed booby, Sula nebouxii