Problems

Age
Difficulty
Found: 79

Investigating one case, the investigator John Smith discovered that the key witness is the one from the Richardson family who, on that fateful day, came home before the others. The investigation revealed the following facts.

1. The neighbour Maria Ramsden, wanting to borrow some salt from the Richardson’s, rang their doorbell, but no one opened the door. At what time though? Who knows? It was already dark...

2. Jill Richardson came home in the evening and found both children in the kitchen, and her husband was on the sofa – he had a headache.

3. The husband, Anthony Richardson, declared that, when he came home, immediately sat down on the sofa and had a nap. He did not see anyone, nor did he hear anything, and the neighbour definitely did not come – the doorbell would have woken him up.

4. The daughter, Sophie, said that when she returned home, she immediately went to her room, and she does not know anything about her father, however, in the hallway, as always, she stumbled on Dan’s shoes.

5. Dan does not remember when he came home. He also did not see his father, but he did hear how Sophie got angry about his shoes.

“Aha,” thought John Smith. “What is the likelihood that Dan returned home before his father?”.

Authors: B. Vysokanov, N. Medved, V. Bragin

The teacher grades tests on a scale from 0 to 100. The school can change the upper bound of the scale to any other natural number, recalculating the estimates proportionally and rounding up to integers. A non-integer number, when rounded, changes to the nearest integer; if the fractional part is equal to 0.5, the direction of rounding can be either up or down and it can be different for each question. (For example, an estimate of 37 on a scale of 100 after recalculation in the scale of 40 will go to \(37 \cdot 40/100 = 14.8\) and will be rounded to 15).

The students of Peter and Valerie got marks, which are not 0 and 100. Prove that the school can do several conversions so that Peter’s mark becomes b and Valerie’s mark becomes a (both marks are recalculated simultaneously).

Out of the given numbers 1, 2, 3, ..., 1000, find the largest number \(m\) that has this property: no matter which \(m\) of these numbers you delete, among the remaining \(1000 - m\) numbers there are two, of which one is divisible by the other.

Author: A.A. Egorov

Calculate the square root of the number \(0.111 \dots 111\) (100 ones) to within a) 100; b) 101; c)* 200 decimal places.

A spherical sun is observed to have a finite number of circular sunspots, each of which covers less than half of the sun’s surface. These sunspots are said to be enclosed, that is no two sunspots can touch, and they do not overlap with one another. Prove that the sun will have two diametrically opposite points that are not covered by sunspots.

When Gulliver came to Lilliput, he found that everything was exactly 12 times shorter than in his homeland. Can you say how many Lilliputian matchboxes fit into the matchbox of Gulliver?

A cube with a side of 1 m was sawn into cubes with a side of 1 cm and they were in a row (along a straight line). How long was the line?

In some country there are 101 cities, and some of them are connected by roads. However, every two cities are connected by exactly one path.

How many roads are there in this country?