Problems

Age
Difficulty
Found: 1860

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?

In an ordinary set of dominoes, there are 28 tiles. How many tiles would a set of dominoes contain if the values indicated on the tiles did not range from 0 to 6, but from 0 to 12?

A class contains 38 pupils. Prove that within the class there will be at least 4 pupils born in the same month.

In the town of Ely, all the families have separate houses. On one fine day, each family moved into another, one of the houses house that used to be occupied by other families. They afterwards decided to paint all houses in red, blue or green colors in such a way that for each family the colour of the new and old houses would not match. Is this always possible to paint te houses in such a way, regardless of how families decided to move?

At the cat show, 10 male cats and 19 female cats sit in a row where next to each female cat sits a fatter male cat. Prove that next to each male cat is a female cat, which is thinner than it.

The vendor has a cup weighing scales with unequal shoulders and weights. First he weighs the goods on one cup, then on the other, and takes the average weight. Does he deceive customers?

Restore the numbers. Restore the digits in the following example by dividing as is shown in the image

This problem is from Ancient Rome.

A rich senator died, leaving his wife pregnant. After the senator’s death it was found out that he left a property of 210 talents (an Ancient Roman currency) in his will as follows: “In the case of the birth of a son, give the boy two thirds of my property (i.e. 140 talents) and the other third (i.e. 70 talents) to the mother. In the case of the birth of a daughter, give the girl one third of my property (i.e. 70 talents) and the other two thirds (i.e. 140 talents) to the mother.”

The senator’s widow gave birth to twins: one boy and one girl. This possibility was not foreseen by the late senator. How can the property be divided between three inheritors so that it is as close as possible to the instructions of the will?