Problems

Age
Difficulty
Found: 2013

Is it possible to fill a \(5 \times 5\) table with numbers so that the sum of the numbers in each row is positive and the sum of the numbers in each column is negative?

The distance between Athos and Aramis, galloping along one road, is 20 leagues. In an hour Athos covers 4 leagues, and Aramis – 5 leagues.

What will the distance between them be in an hour?

From a set of weights with masses 1, 2, ..., 101 g, a weight of 19 grams was lost. Can the remaining 100 weights be divided into two piles of 50 weights each in such a way that the masses of both piles are the same?

Pinocchio and Pierrot were racing. Pierrot ran the entire race at the same speed, and Pinocchio ran half the way two times faster than Pierrot, and the second half twice as slow as Pierrot. Who won the race?

Jack and Ben had a bicycle on which they went to a neighborhood village. They rode it in turns, but whenever one rode, the other walked and did not run. They managed to arrive in the village at the same time and almost twice as fast than if they had both walked. How did they do it?

Three tourists must move from one bank of the river to another. At their disposal is an old boat, which can withstand a load of only 100 kg. The weight of one of the tourists is 45 kg, the second – 50 kg, the third – 80 kg. How should they act to move to the other side?

Try to decipher this excerpt from the book “Alice Through the Looking Glass”:

“Zkhq L xvh d zrug,” Kxpswb Gxpswb vdlg, lq udwkhu d vfruqixo wrqh, “lw phdqv mxvw zkdw L fkrrvh lw wr phdq – qhlwkhu pruh qru ohvv”.

The text is encrypted using the Caesar Cipher technique where each letter is replaced with a different letter a fixed number of places down in the alphabet. Note that the capital letters have not been removed from the encryption.

A kindergarten used cards for teaching children how to read: on some, the letter “MA” are written, on the rest – “DA”. Each child took three cards and began to compose words from them. It turned out that the word “MAMA” was created from the cards by 20 children, the word “DADA” by 30 children, and the word “MADA” by 40 children. How many children all had 3 of the same cards?

Try to make a square from a set of rods:

6 rods of length 1 cm, 3 rods of length 2 cm each, 6 rods of length 3 cm and 5 rods of length 4 cm. You are not able to break the rods or place them on top of one another.

Write a number instead of the space (in letters, not numbers!) to get a true sentence:

THIS SENTENCE HAS ... LETTERS

(Note that the dash does not count as a letter, i.e. the word twenty-two is made up of 9 letters).