Anyway, so as I was about to say last week but didn’t get a chance, there was this bank once which held a week-long contest to provide its tellers incentive to convince their regular customers to open new accounts. All five tellers participated, and the winner received two days off with pay. You have to find out each teller’s first and last name (one first name is Trudy; one surname is West) and how many new accounts each one acquired using the following eight clues.
(1) The five brought in a total of 132 new accounts; (2) The winner brought in 36 accounts, but no teller brought in fewer than 15; (3) Billings got six more new accounts than Meyer; (4) Ian didn’t get the fewest accounts; (5) Russo got an odd number of accounts; (6) Jessica got five more accounts than Robert; (7) Ellen got three more accounts than Kurtz; (8) The two men together got a total of 44 accounts.
THROUGHPUT
(The puzzle from our collective hoary yore was: “Each point in an infinite plane is coloured either red or blue. Prove that there are two points of the same colour that are exactly one metre apart.”)
If you consider any three points forming an equilateral triangle with a side length of 1 metre, two of these will be the same colour. -- Kishore Rao, kishoremrao@hotmail.com
Take a red or blue point as centre and draw a circle with radius 1 metre. The circumference will have a probability of 50% red and 50% blue points. So there will be for sure at least one red or blue point which will be 1 metre apart from the centre. -- Saifuddin S F Khomosi,Dubai Select a point O as centre, draw a circle of radius one metre.
There are two possibilities. (1) The circle drawn contains on its circumference a point of the same colour as O in which case both the points of the same colour are one meter apart. (2) All the points on the circumference have a colour different from O. Then any chord of length one meter connects two points of the same colour on the circumference of the circle. -- Narayana Murty Karri, k_n_murty@yahoo.com
(The second one was: “How many pets do you have if all of them are camels except two, all are giraffes except two, and all of them are llamas except two? The trick is you also have to give two answers.”)
I think I have three pets, one each of a camel, giraffe and a llama. Can’t think of a second answer. (Ah VS, but others can -- MS) -- Vijayalakshmi Sudheer, vijisudheer62@gmail.com
The two answers to the first puzzle: (1) I have two dogs and no camel, giraffe or Llama. (2) I have one camel, one giraffe and one Llama. In both the above cases the conditions of the puzzle are satisfied. -- Hemalatha T, hemalatha1956@gmail.com
(The third problem was: “There are two one-hour fuses. Meaning, after being lit they burn out in exactly one hour. But they burn very unevenly during that hour -- sometimes faster, sometimes slower. Given a matchbox, how can one measure 45 minutes?”)
Let the two fuses be named A and B. Light both ends of A and one end of B simultaneously. A will burn out in 30 minutes. As soon as A burns out light the other end of B. Left over part of B burns out in 15 minutes. Thus total time taken to burn out B is 45 minutes. -- V K Bargah, vkbargah@gmail.com
The 1st fuse is lit on both ends and the 2nd one on only one end. The 1st fuse will burn out in half an hour. Exactly at that moment the other end of the 2nd fuse is lit. It will be exactly 45 minutes from the starting point when the 2nd fuse burns out. -- Abhishek Narayan, dudeabhi4u@gmail.com
BUT GOOGLE THIS NOW
1. The pronunciation of “polish” is different when the first letter is capitalised as in “Polish”. How about at least four or more words like that?
2. What’s the next number in the series: 0, 0, 9, 1, 0, 55, 0, _? (Incidentally -- hint, hint -- this sequence is developed from the first seven even numbers.)