Solve the puzzle by Mukul Sharma
Mukul Sharma is a multifaceted personality, having acted in films, run a pest control business, made TV serials, partnered an ad agency, produced front page pocket cartoons for The Telegraph newspaper and edited Science Today magazine for six years. He has written Dream Sequence, an anthology of science fiction short stories, among other works. He is a member of International Science Writers Association. He also has to his credit a weekly spiritual column for the Economic Times. But that's not why we are introducing him in these pages. He has been running a popular puzzle column Mindsport in a leading daily for many years now. Starting this issue, we bring to you a puzzle by Mukul Sharma every month. Pull up your socks for the mental jog
Puzzle for August 2009 Issue
The average time taken by a group of 44 people aged between 12 and 65 during a trial test at the Cleveland Cognitive Clinic in the US was 22 minutes to solve this one. There are five houses and in each house lives a man of a certain nationality who has his favourite drink, his favourite game and his own unusual pet. And . . .
(1) There are five houses in a row, each having a different colour.
(2) The Englishman lives in the red house.
(3) The green house is to the right of the white house.
(4) The Italian owns a guppy.
(5) Lemonade is drunk in the green house.
(6) The Swede drinks coffee.
(7) The man who plays backgammon owns a toad.
(8) The man who plays racquetball lives in the yellow house.
(9) The man in the middle house drinks milk.
(10) The Russian lives in the first house.
(11) The man who owns the camel lives next to the man who plays quoits.
(12) The man who owns the rat lives next to the man who plays racquetball.
(13) The man who plays solitaire drinks vodka.
(14) The American plays charades; (15) The Russian lives next to the blue house.
Question #1: Which man drinks diet soda? Question #2: Which man owns a spider monkey?
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Answer will be published in the September issue
Last month puzzle and the answer
Puzzle
Three friends went fishing, having agreed to share the catch equally. After a successful day, they put the catch on the boat deck to be divided up later, had a big party, and went to sleep. In the middle of the night the first fisherman wakes up, feeling ill, and decides to go home with his share. But he sees that the catch can’t be divided evenly into three because there is one fish too many. So he throws the extra fish into the lake, takes his share, and goes home. A little later the second fisherman wakes up, also feeling sick, and decides to go home with his share. Not realising that the first fisherman has already left, he also sees that the catch can’t be divided equally because of an extra fish. He throws the extra fish into the water and departs. Finally the third fisherman wakes up, ill as well, and unaware that his friends have gone, counts the fish, finds one extra, throws it away and takes his share. The question is, what is the smallest number of fish that the fishermen could have caught
Answer
Regarding the smallest number of fish that the three fishermen could have caught, it’s almost a 7th standard algebra problem actually! There’s no excuse for anyone not solving it. Assume the original catch as x. Then 2/3*(x - 1) will remain after the first man’s share is taken away; 2/3 of this value after the second man, and so on. Finally, (8x - 38)/27 will remain after all of them take their shares. For this expression to be a minimum integral value, x has to be 25. And that is the answer! Top
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