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A mother and daughter are sat together on the settee, flicking through a photo album, whilst a massive international event plays out live on the television.
‘See this photo?’ says the mother, ‘this was taken on New Year’s Eve 1999. What a night!’
‘How old were you in that photo Mum?’ asks the daughter.
‘Well, funny you should ask that, I was halfway between your age now and my age now, precisely to the day’.
Since their dates of birth are 12th March 1980 and 4th May 2005, what was on the TV?
Find the hidden word in each of the following sentences – they are on a related theme.
Are high winds or heavy rain forecast for this afternoon?
Are you a stud or a jock?
Diablo is Spanish for devil
Disco Stu, artist in residence.
I’d like to implant a gene to make me less lazy.
I’ve been on a Russian journalism course.
Is Kevin or Mandy in charge?
It’s easier to go under the prison wall, rather than over.
There’s a film version of Blankety Blank, with Matt Le Blanc as Terry Wogan.
Who’s in charge now, Mandy or Kevin?
Insert the numbers 1 to 12 into the twelve empty spaces, so that the sum of the three numbers along each edge give the totals shown.
This isn't a puzzle in any traditional sense, however I thought I'd share it here anyway:
Noughts and crosses (tic tac toe) is famously a game which will always end in a draw if both players are playing rationally.
However with a simple change to the rules which would appear to be both sensible and fair - namely that neither player may place their first mark in the centre square - the player who goes first can always force a win.
The puzzle then, if there is one, is merely for the reader to satisfy them self that this is true, and to determine, if you were going first, how you would force a win.
I have taken a quotation, and I have replaced each of the letters with one-, two- of three-digit numbers according to the table below. Can you change it back to letters?
Be careful though, as some sequences of numbers could lead to several words, for instance 31110 could mean CAT (3,1,110), but could equally mean MAD (31,1,10).
This particular quotation is from Leo Tolstoy.
Where in everyday life in the UK might you encounter a numerical sequence that alternately subtracts 49 or adds 50 to the previous number?
When ‘Christian festival’, ‘annoy’ and ‘childminder’ initially lurch to the right, they become ‘food tester’, ‘parent’ and ‘better adapted’.
What animal does ‘speak/complete’ become?
Insert the numbers 1 to 8 into the eight empty squares, so that the sum of the three numbers along each edge give the totals shown.
Of the 50 US states, there is one that contains all of the letters of OLD ASH, and there is one that contains none of those letters.
Find both of the states.
Draw fences between some of the posts so that each post is at the junction of exactly three fences.
These fences will divide the field into several paddocks; any paddock whose area is greater than a single triangle will contain a number, which will indicate the area of the paddock that contains it.
The boundary fence is already in place, so any post on the boundary only needs one more fence emerging from it in order to make up its full complement.
For example:
Here is the puzzle:
You have a pair of concentric circles, of diameters 187 and 119 respectively. If you draw a chord of a particular length, the points at which it goes in and out of the inner circle will divide the line exactly into 3 parts, each of length ‘x’.
What is the value of ‘x’?
What was unusual about the two 1990’s England Rugby players ‘Beal’ and ‘Back’?
You don't need any detailed knowledge of Rugby to answer this.
Where in everyday life would you find the numbers
2^(-A/2+1/4) and 2^(-A/2-1/4)
where A = 4?
There are five common words, each of which is a rearrangement of the 8 letters of LARGE TIN.
What are they?
In a new football league there are five teams: Allesley, Bannerbrook, Canley, Dunsmore and Earlsdon. Over the course of 10 weeks, each team must play every other team twice (once home and once away). There will be two games each week, with one team getting a rest. It is your job to organise the fixtures.
Is it possible to organise the fixtures so that each team alternates between home and away games?
If it is, find an example fixture list; if it is not, why not?
I’m thinking of a number.
If I was to write down all of the numbers from 1 up to and including my number, the number of digits I would write down would be exactly 4 times my number.
What is my number?
This is really quite a tough one, so I wouldn’t blame you for sitting this one out. I promise to be gentler next week!
I have invented a function of a number, let’s call it the ‘cumulative unrepetitiousness’, C(n). The function looks at all the positive whole numbers up to and including n, and splits them into two categories: into category A go all of the numbers which contain some identical consecutive digits (such as 113 or 3457335), and into category B go all of the numbers that contain no identical consecutive digits (such as 34567 of 2323). C(n) is the size of category B minus the size of category A.
The value of C(n) either goes up or down by 1 as n goes up by 1:
C(1) = 1
C(2) = 2
C(3) = 3
C(4) = 4
C(5) = 5
C(6) = 6
C(7) = 7
C(8) = 8
C(9) = 9
C(10) = 10
C(11) = 9
C(12) = 10
etc.
As you can see, for small values of n, C(n) is always positive.
When n gets big enough, C(n) is always negative.
For a brief time in the middle, C(n) crosses the zero line several times. In fact there are a total of 35 positive values of n for which C(n) = 0, before it heads off into the negative zone for ever more.
Your task is simply to find the first of these.
At my office there is often confusion created around our five-digit contract numbers. A common error involved numbers with repeated consecutive digits, for example 54467 might be wrongly written as 54667. To combat this problem it was decided that, for the contract numbers beginning with 6, no repeated consecutive digits would be allowed. So 60000 is out straight away. In fact the first acceptable number of this new scheme would be 60101.
How many of the 10000 possible numbers from 60000 to 69999 can still be used as contract numbers?
I have a bed of nails where the nails, of equal height, are arranged in a square array with 6cm between adjacent rows and 6cm between adjacent columns. I have a globe, 11cm in diameter, which I place onto the bed of nails. It settles so that it is resting on the tips of four nails.
How much higher will the top of the globe be than the tips of the nails?
I have an n-sided die. I roll it repeatedly until I've seen all of the sides at least once. The average number of throws this should take is 72.
How many sides does the die have?