Pesky Puzzlers

NEW!  Pesky Puzzler(s) Challenge for Dec ’24:

Find a reasonable explanation for the Bonus Krazy Pic, as mentioned in the Dec 9 Mailing.  Prizes await correct (or reasonable?) solutions.

Previous Puzzlers (Some are omitted for logistical reasons.)

PP 24.20:

1. If there are four cars ahead of a car, four cars behind a car, and a car in the middle, what is the fewest number of cars in the line? 5
2. What three letters can be arranged to describe a beverage, a verb, and a homonym? (Is current usage ‘homophone’?) A, E, and T.
3. 1/5 ÷ 1/5 ÷ 1/5 ÷ 1/5 = ?  25
4. How many cards must you draw from a deck of 52 cards to be sure that at least two are from the same suit? 5

PP 24.19:

1. When I cleaned out my MSU office, I found two items tacked to a bulletin board. One was Hampton’s Travel Tips #628. The other was a coupon for a drawing, and was numbered 9998896.  Knowing my fascination with numbers, why might I have saved each of these?  (LOTS of possible answers here, of course, and most will receive credit.)   My own reasons? 🙂  628 consists of the first two perfect numbers (6 & 28).  9998896 still reads as a number when turned ‘upside down and backwards’.  (180 degree rotation, if you will.)  There were other perfectly legitimate ‘answers’.  (I particularly liked ‘9998896 has no digits with a straight line.’)                      
2. Name two consecutive primes numbers whose product is 899.  29 and 31
3. Melissa went to dinner with Andrew, George, and Ulysses.  She ate alone, but they all showed up to pay for the meal.  Why?  Andrew (Jackson), George (Washington), and Ulysses (S. Grant) are all faces on the bills she used to pay.
4. Which number is the third smallest of these?  0.3, 3.03, 0.303, 3.3303, 3.303  3.03 is the third smallest.  (It was pointed out this makes it the third largest as well!)

PP 24.18:

1. How many ways are there to re-arrange the letters in the word ‘STOP’ ? 24  b) How many of those form a common-usage word? At least 5.
2. Several years ago, I drove a nail into a tree exactly five feet above the ground.  The tree grows at a rate of a half-foot a year.  Last year, 11 years later, I returned and saw the tree.  How far above the ground was the nail? 5 feet.  Trees grow from the top.
3. Geography Trivia.  Missouri is one of only two states that share a border with eight other states.  a)  Can you name the eight states? (suspect a map might help?) Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Tennesee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma b)  What’s the other state that shares that distinction? Tennessee.

PP 24.17:

1. More Creative Fun?  (Have we done this one before?).  Make as long a sentence as you can in which each word of the sentence begins with the same letter.  (You may pick the letter.)  Subscriber Liz Tidwell submitted a very clever LONG sentence here where each word begins with the letter B.  She hopes it’s “not too risque”.  🙂  I’ll let you judge for yourself.  (I’d rate it a mild PG).  You can see the sentence at the very bottom of this page.
2. Nifty Trick?  Pick any two digit number and multiply it by 101.  What happens?  Can you explain why that happens?  (You can get – or have gotten – a partial answer here by checking Isn’t Math Wonderful selection in the Mailing.)  The answer is a four-digit number consisting of the original two-digit number repeated.
3. Geography Trivia?  Missouri is one of only two states that share a border with eight other states.  a)  Can you name the eight states? (suspect a map might help?)  b)  What’s the other state that shares that distinction?  I think we’ll leave this one on the docket another time around.  See Above.

PP 24.16: Creative Fun

1. Write a limerick using the first line, “An apple, two grapes, and a pear . . .” See Limericks for submissions.
2. Write as long a sentence as possible with each word beginning with succesive letters of the alphabet, starting with A. (Example:  Albert Brown could dance.)  See Other Submissions for submissions for #2 & #3.
3. Name some (at least one?) things that would be different if we has six fingers on each hand (five and a thumb).

PP 24.15:  Do any or all:

1. Mary’s mother had three daughters. The first two were named April and May.  What was the name of the third daughter?  Mary!  🙂
2. A cheetah was clocked running 550 feet in 10 seconds. About how many miles per hour is that?  37.5 mph.
3. Ninety-six is 37.5% of what number? 256

PP 24.14:  Do any or all:

1. Two is company and three is a crowd. 🙂   What are four and five?  Nine. 🙂
2. a)  Find the smallest integer that is the product of 3 primes. 8 (2x2x2) b)  Same question for three different primes? 30 (2x3x5)
3. There are roughly 2 lbs of muscle for every 5 lbs of body weight. At that rate how much would the muscle of a 180 man weigh? 72 pounds.

PP 24.13: Do any or all.

1. A man describes his daughters, saying, “They are all blonde, but two; all brunette but two; and all redheaded but two.” How many daughters does he have?  3.  One blonde, one redhead, one brunette.

2. Find a number less than 100 that is increased by one-fifth of its value when its digits are reversed. 45

3. What letter comes next in the following sequence? D R M F S L T_  (Hint: think Julie Andrews.) D.  (Do, Re, Mi . . .)

PP 24.12:

The 22nd and 24th Presidents of the US had the same mother and same father, but were not brothers. How can this be?  Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th President.

PP(s) 24.10 & 11:  Do any or all.

1. An insect in a picture is 1/2 inch long and a label says “enlarged by a factor of 12”.  What is the insect’s actual length?  1/24 inch.

2. Alice wrote a list of the first fifty counting numbers.  How many times did she write the digit 3?  15.

3. Alice (above) was having so much fun, she decided to continue her list until she got to 1000. But after writing 630 digits, she finally got tired and stopped.  What was the last integer she wrote?  the last full integer she wrote was 276 (or the digit 6).

4.  (Repeat from recently?)  What five-letter word has the last four letters silent?  queue

PP 24.9    Harvey owes Sam $27.00.  Sam owes Fred $6.00 and Albert $15.30.  If, with Sam’s permission, Harvey pays off Sam’s debt to Albert, how much does he still owe Sam?  $11.70

PP 24.8  A couple of (hopefully) easier ones.

1. What is the value of this fraction?  (6 – 9 x 7) / (6 + 4 x 3)  -57/18.  Or -19/6
2. A palindrome is a number (of more than one digit) that reads the same forwards and backwards.  How many palindromes are there between 1 & 100?  9  (Optional extra:  Between 1 & 1000?) 99

PP 24.7 THE INHERITANCE PROBLEM

A man divides his cattle among his four sons so that the oldest son gets 1/2 the herd, the next son 1/4, the next 1/5, and the youngest son the remaining 20 cows. How many cattle are in the herd?  The man has 400 cattle in his herd.  (Trial and error, a little fraction work, or simple algebra will yield the solution.)

PP 24.5  THE MILK JUGS

A milkman has 2 empty jugs:  a 3-gallon jug and a 5-gallon jug.  How can he measure exactly ONE gallon of milk without wasting any mile?  1. Fill the 3-gallon jug and pour it into the 5-gallon jug.  2. Re-fill the 3-gallon jug and pour it into the partially-filled 5-gallon jug.  3. When that jug is full, what remains in the 3-gallon jug will be one gallon.

PP 24.4  NUMBER PUZZLES

1.  How many natural numbers are between the square roots of 8 & 80?  Six.  (SQRT 8 is just less than 3, and SQRT 80 is not quite 9. So the natural #s between them would be 3,4,5,6,7, & 8.)

2. What’s the largest three-digit number divisible by both 7 & 9?  945

BONUS:  How many nonzero perfect squares can be displayed on an eight-digit calculator?  9999

PP 24.3  HOPEFULLY-EASY RIDDLES?

1.  If two’s company and three’s a crowd, what are four and five?  Nine.

2.  A man shaves several times a day, but still has a beard.  How can that be? He is a barber.

3. What can you hold in your left hand, but not your right? Your right elbow (or arm, etc).

4. If you throw a White rock into the Red Sea, what would it become? Wet

BONUS:  What is so delicate that saying its name breaks it? Silence

Liz Tidwell’s submission for PP 24.17, #1.  (Sentence with each word beginning with same letter)l

Belen, Brazil-born, but Bergen-based, bodacious beauty Bonnie Betty Brownlee began borrowing bulky, black-banded blankets before boldly boisterous bedtimes basically because bedsheet buddies besmirched brazen bare boobies bearing blue blood blotches.