A Problem of Wearing Shoes

      On a certain island, 5% of the 10000 inhabitants are one legged and half of the others go barefoot. What is the least number of shoes needed in the island?

Answer:   10,000 – Surprised? Well, this is how it works out. It is really immaterial what percentage of the population is one legged! In any case the one-legged people will all require on shoe per head. From the remaining, half will go barefoot and therefore they need no shoes and the rest will need two shoes per head. 

And this works out at one shoe per person for the ‘others’.

Therefore, we shall need for the whole population on the average one shoe per head.

Share of a Garden

     My friend owns a small rose garden in Bangalore.

       My sister lalitha has a share of 3/5 of it, and my sister Vasantha has twice as much has myself. What fraction of the field belongs to me?

Answer:   2/15: The two pertinent equations are:

B+C = 2/5

And B = 2C

From these we are able to obtain

3C =2/5 or C 2/15

A Book Worm’s Route

          There are there volumes of the same book each three centimeters thick. They are kept in shelf side by side in order. Volume, I, II and III, if a book worm starts outside the front cover of volume I and eats its way through to the outside of the back cover of volume III, travelling in a straight line, how far does it travel?

Answer:  Three Centimetres: The book worm only has to go from the front cover of Volume I to the outside of the book cover of Volume III, in other words he only has to travel through Volume II, which is 3 Centimetres.

Piling up Corpuscles

       The red corpuscles in the human body are said to have a thickness of 00008 inch. Approximately how high would all the corpuscles in an average adult’s body be if they could be piled on top of one another without compression?

 Answer: About 110,000,000 feet.

A Cipher

What is a ‘Cipher’?

Answer: ‘Cipher’ means zero. The word’ ‘Cipher’ comes from the Arabic Sifr. Our word ‘Zero is derived from this word.