Problems

Age
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Found: 2426

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).

Find the largest six-digit number, for which each digit, starting with the third, is equal to the sum of the two previous digits.

Find the largest number of which each digit, starting with the third, is equal to the sum of the two previous digits.

James spent the first Tuesday of some month in Liverpool and the first Tuesday after the first Monday he spent in Newcastle. In the next month, James spent the first Tuesday in Dover and the first Tuesday after the first Monday he spent in Bristol. Could you determine the dates (day and month) spent by James in each of the cities?

Dave spent the first Tuesday of the month in Bath, and the first Tuesday after the first Monday in Cardiff. The following month Dave spent the first Tuesday in London, and the first Tuesday after the first Monday in Cambridge. Can you determine what month and date Dave was in each of the cities?

A schoolboy told his friend Bob:

“We have thirty-five people in the class. And imagine, each of them is friends with exactly eleven classmates...”

“It cannot be,” Bob, the winner of the mathematical Olympiad, answered immediately. Why did he decide this?

Alice the fox and Basilio the cat are counterfeiters. Basilio makes coins heavier than real ones, and Alice makes lighter ones. Pinocchio has 15 identical in appearance coins, but one coin is fake. How can Pinocchio determine who made the false coin – Basilio the cat or Alice the fox – with only 2 weighings?