Enjoyable questions and problems

  There are 20 houses on the 13 th Street in a small town. 15 of these houses have a dog. 9 houses have a cat. No house is without a pet. How many houses have a dog and no cat?  Houses that have a dog = 15 Houses that havea cat =       9 Total number of houses = 20 How can the first two numbers add up to more than the number of houses? That is because some houses have a cat as well as a dog. Consider 15 + 9 - 20 = 4. So, four houses have dogs as well as cats.  How many houses have a dog and no cat? 15 - 4 = 11  Srinivasan Ramani 

  There are 20 houses on the 13 th Street in a small town. 15 of these houses have a dog. 9 houses have a cat. No house is without a pet. How many houses have a dog and no cat? (The answer will appear here on Thursday, 11 th August). Srinivasan Ramani   

You are at supermarket and pick up three bars of chocolate. Each has its price printed on it: $2.75. You take the three bars to the paying counter. What should you give the teller? There is a simple way of deciding how much to pay even if you don’t know what is three times 2.75. Come back to this blog tomorrow and the answer will be there. 

  A doghouse has a floor 2 feet wide and 3 feet long. Ram wants to cover this floor with tiles that are 1 foot long and 1 foot wide. How many tiles would he need to complete this task? Ramani

  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 

I will post the answers in this blog on Sunday the 10 th  April. You can try asking an adult at home. Don't ask younger people. They will know the answers!  1.    How many sides does a cube have? 2.    Think of a square with 2 inches sides, and a circle with 2 inches diameter.       Imagine one ant walking all round the square and another ant walking all round the circle, both at the same speed. Which ant will take more time? 3.    A car is travelling north when it makes a right turn. What direction would it be traveling in after making a total of three right turns? 4.    Sam  puts a spoon of sugar in one cup of milk, stirs it till the sugar dissolves and drinks half a cup of milk. How much sugar would he have consumed if the spoon of sugar weighed six grams? Srinivasan Ramani   

There is a circular park with a walking path going all round. There is also a straight path – the central walkway from A to B. See the diagram below: Suppose you walk the straight path from A to B, which is 100 yards long. Your friend walks from A all the way around the circular path till he comes back to A. How many yards will your friend’s walk be? His walk cannot be less than 200 yards. Can you guess why? It is actually more than 300 yards. How do you find out the length of your friend's walk? Can you discuss it with someone?