back with a few...

[Ghost Post]

ive got a few riddles that are unsolved in my book, and a few that havent made it into my book, because i think they are too chestnutty(i know the answer to most of them)
1.you can spell candy with 2 letters, what are they?

2.al, bob, chuck, dave, elayne and nicola are asked their ages...
al says 23 bob says 61 chuck says 57 and dave says 21.
the women(elayne and nicola) refuse to give their ages(typical)
the median by the way is 42.

so firstly how do you know that the sum of the ages of the women is 84, and secondly how old is elayne if nicola says that she is twice as old as elayne?

3.a plane crashed and everyone died, but there were survivors, HOW?

[daniel801]

1.) CE (C and e)

[Suspence]

1. M & M
2a. If you have two women and you want to find their median age, you add their ages and then divide by the number of women (2). If you have the median age of 2 women then, all you must do is multiply by two to find the sum of their ages.
2b. Elayne is 28. Nicola would be 56.
3. People parachuted from the plane before it crashed.

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[daniel801]

3...everyone did die, but of old age

[Coyote]

1) Surely you mean 'C and Y' for this one, daniel? On a related note, how do you spell 'abandoned' with just two letters?

3) The survivors were all the people who weren't on the plane.

[mikegoo]

Answer to Coyote's a 'b' and one 'd'

[Coyote]

Well...yes, but then the 'candy' riddle made that pretty obvious, no? On a related related note, how do you spell 'Blind New Zealander' with just two letters?

[mole]

kw?

[Chuck]

3. The problem says everyone dies, not just the people on the plane. There can't be any human survivors.

[Tahnan]

quote:

---

2.al, bob, chuck, dave, elayne and nicola are asked their ages...
al says 23 bob says 61 chuck says 57 and dave says 21.
the women(elayne and nicola) refuse to give their ages(typical)
the median by the way is 42.

---

The median of what? Of all six ages, or of the two women? If it's just the two women, there's no need to go through the men's ages. If it's all six of them, the median can be 42 without our knowing anything about the sum of the women's ages--Elayne and Nicola may be 27 and 98, respectively. (Or, instead of 98, anything over 57.) Other possibilities are left as an exercise to the reader.

I think the answer to the question "How do you know that the sum of the ages of the women is 84?" is the same as the answer to the question "How do you know that I have brown eyes": I just told you so.

[Ghost Post]

i meant to say the median of all 6 was 42!

[T McAy]

In question 3, perhaps the past tense "were" refers to a general time period before the plane crashed when there were survivors from catastrophes in which not everyone died.

[Icarus]

3) How about the fact there were survivors of the plane crash. But the crash was in a remote place, and the survivors eventually died from lack of food and water - or they froze to death.

[GH]

Perhaps the way that I know that the sum of the women's ages is 84 is that I know that neither of them is younger than 28, or that they're both younger than Chuck, or something like that.

(Granted, that's not information that's put forth in the problem. I could also claim that I know the sum of their ages is 84 because I have copies of their birth certificates. I was just trying to think a very ambiguous piece of information I might have that would still nail down the sum of their ages.)

[Suspence]

The way you know that thier ages must add up to 42 is that there is no possible way to come up with a median of 42 unless you use the 2 women's ages as the 2 middle numbers. As it stands you have ages of 21, 23, 57, and 61. 57 and 23 make a median of 40. So at least one of their ages has to go in between those 2 numbers to arrive at a median 42. So you are limited to one girls age being between 23 and 57. And as that goes, no number between 23 and 57 can combine with either 23 or 57 to produce a median of 42. Therefore, both ages have to be between 23 and 57, and as that is the case only numbers that add to 84 will produce a median of 42. The only set of numbers that fit then are 28 and 56, as 56 is twice 28.

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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature

[This message has been edited by Suspence13 (edited 03-11-2002 11:29 PM).]

[Tahnan]

Suspence13: Can you explain why 21 23 27 57 61 98 (italicized numbers are the ages of the women, added to the list of the men's ages) does not give a median of 84?

[Suspence]

Actually, that gives a median of 42, not 84. I guess implied in my solution is the fact that I already knew that I needed a number that was double the other age. But looking at the puzzle again, that was a secondary question, I shouldn't have considered that I knew that when solving the first part. I'll rethink for a moment.

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[Suspence]

Well, I've looked and looked and I think Tahnan is correct. His 21,23, 27, 57, 61, 98 solution is feasible if you don't know first that you need one of the ages to be double the other age. Although 98 is old, it's certainly not unreasonable. So it appears that there is no way to know for sure that the sum of thier ages is 84, as Tahnan has come up with a sum of 125. Unless there is something I'm missing, but it's really late so I might not be thinking quite clearly at the moment.

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[quercitron]

Are you sure you guys don't mean mean or average instead of median?

q

[GH]

"Median" is the right term for the discussion here.

Check it out.

As explained on that page, if we had an odd number of measurements, the one in the middle would be the median. When the number of measurements is even (as in this case), you have to average the two middle terms.

[Lepton]

3) Maybe the survivors were animals, while the humans all died?

(if this is the answer, I despise your logic)

[Ghost Post]

the solution to 2 i know, and it has already been posted here, but im not telling who got it right, unless you already know that is!

[Tahnan]

Since the "correct" answer has been given--and since I am not convinced there is a correct answer--perhaps you should go ahead and tell us.

[Suspence]

I agree with Tahnan.

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[Ghost Post]

well 13, you were right down to a tee!
the question came from an ex-exam question(from mock GCSE's)and i thought it would be good to put in my revision book, so i did.
(i got the question right by the way)

[Suspence]

But, as Tahnan pointed out, I was wrong. The only way that my answer is correct is if it is already given that one woman's age is twice the other woman's age. Without this info, Tahnan's solution is valid. Perhaps your test posed the puzzle that way.

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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature

[Tablesaw]

3) Everyone on the plane died, but they were survived by their wives, husbands, children and families. These persons not on the plane were their survivors.

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Tablesaw
(It's the saw of the table!)