I came across a couple of interesting riddles lately. One was introduced by a good friend, Barak Paztal, who just returned from Beijing (welcome back Barak and Irit), the other was told on the radio. I thought they are worth sharing. I will share the solutions (and some insights) next week. Anyone cares to take a crack at the riddles? Any insights?
1. If one wanted to surround the earth with rope, he will need roughly 40,000 km of rope. What if he wanted to have the rope 1 meter away from the ground, how much additional rope is needed?
2. A father of three was on his deathbed. He was the owner of seventeen camels. He wrote a will: “please give half my camels to my older son, a third to the middle son, and two ninths to the youngest”. The brothers were utterly and totally confused. They didn’t know how to execute the will. Finally they went to a wise lady who lived close by. She solved the problem for them. Can you guess what her solution was?
As I said, solutions and insights next week.
Riddle number 1. If one wanted to surround the earth with rope, he will need roughly 40,000 km of rope. What if he wanted to have the rope 1 meter away from the ground, how much rope will he need? Amazingly, the answer is with 2*pi rope which is roughly 6.28 meters, you can get the rope to be 1 meter away from the ground. So with even less than 10 meters, you could easily get a donkey to crawl under…
The circumference of the earth is roughly 40,000 km. This makes the radius roughly 6,366 km. Your question is basically to increase the radius by 1 meter or to make it 6366001 meters.
6366000*2*pi = 39998757.665505247
6366001*2*pi = 39998763.948690554
763.9486 – 757.6655 = 6.2831 (roughly 2*pi)
Increase the radius by 1 meter will yield an additional 6.28 in the circumference. (Easy for a donkey, harder for an elephant…
Riddle number 2. This one has some insights. The old lady suggested that they take her only camel – as a gift. They did, and suddenly everything worked out. The older son received nine camels, the middle son six, and the younger one – two. But when they came to actually split the inheritance, they couldn’t help noticing that there was one camel extra. Naturally, they returned it to the old wise lady…
Insights? don’t rush to conclusions before you understand the problem and have a chance to work it. Another one: sometimes you need a physical help to solve a problem, when virtual help is perfectly sufficient.
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