Answers to the four questions posted last week

 

1.  Look at a cubical box if you can find one. It does not even have to be  exact cube. If it is on a table, you can see it has a top, four sides and a bottom that sits on the table. So, how many sides does it have?

2.   

Try and draw a circle inside the square so that it just touches all four sides of the square.
The diameter of this circle is 2 inches, and it fits completely inside the square. So, the ant that must walk all round the circle will take less time. Right?

3.  The car is traveling north when it makes a right turn.
    After this turn, it would be traveling east. The it makes another right     turn.
    After that turn, the car would be traveling south. Now it makes the        third right turn.
    After this turn, the car would be traveling west.

4.   What is half of six? 3!

    Srinivasan Ramani 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The trick Julius Caesar used to play

Image
Julius Caesar adopted a tricky method of sending messages to his generals through messengers. What if his enemies caught hold of the messenger and read the message? They will then know Caesar’s plans. Caesar’s trick was to change the letters in the message. For instance, he could write “D” instead of “A”, “E” instead of “B” and so on. Every letter would be replaced by another three places further down in the alphabetical order. What do you do with “Y”? What is three places beyond “Y”? The trick is to think of the letters being arranged in a ring so that “A” follows “Z” and “B” follows “A”. In this ring you can go three places from “Y” and find “B”. The letter three places ahead of “Z” will be “C”. To encipher a message, that is to make it secret, we first choose a key. I recommend that you choose a whole number between 1 and 6 as the key. Suppose you choose 3 as the key. Now replace every letter in “TEXT” by one which is 3 steps away along the ring. Do you get “WHAW”? You can send
Read more

You cannot win every time

Image
If you see the marks students get in a subject in your class, you will find that the largest number of people get average marks, while the number of those getting higher than the average gradually reduces. Similarly, the number of those getting less than average also reduces as you move away from the average. When teachers make a graph of the marks earned by the class, they get something that looks like this:                                                                     Image Credit: Monika Wahi,  CC-BY-SA-4.0 ,                                      Image from Wikimedia Commons In this example, we assume that D is the average score 50%. Other points are: A             20% B             30% C             40% E             60% F             70% G            80% The height above each letter shows how many people got that many marks: 2 students got 20%, 5 students got 30%, 7 students got 40%, 8 students got 50% 7 students got 60%, 5 students got 70%, and 2 students got
Read more

Cause and Effect

Image
  Cropped by Ramani. This file is licensed under the  Creative Commons   Attribution 3.0 Unported  license. Attribution:  Adeeb Atwan A fast motorbike went down our street one morning, making a big noise. Ten minutes later, my mom dropped her coffee mug. Can you say that the cause of mom dropping the coffee cup was the motorbike’s noise? Or was it a case of mere coincidence? This type of question was known long ago. An old Indian proverb talks about a crow and a palm tree. The crow came and sat on a palm tree and soon the tree fell down. Can we say that the crow’s sitting was the cause of the tree falling?    Or was it a case of mere coincidence? Srinivasan Ramani  
Read more