Ironclaw's
Mathematical Puzzles
Ironclaw the Brazzle found this
ancient stone tablet covered in strange symbols:
He
quickly realised that they represented mathematical equations.
It didn't take him long to work out that:
- an eye meant add,
- an ear meant subtract,
- a black cat meant multiply,
- a white mouse meant divide,
- and lips meant equals.
The other symbols represented the
numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Can you work out which
symbol represents which number? It only took Ironclaw 3 minutes,
but it took Elizabeth Kay 25.
Roll your mouse over Ironclaw's picture for
his solution.
Ironclaw went to a fly-in
restaurant with his friends Slatewing and Brasshead. The bill
came to 30 silver pieces, which Ironclaw thought was
extortionate. After a lot of grumbling all three of them paid
10 silver pieces each. Then the waiter realised he had made a
mistake – it should only have been 25, and the brazzles had
been too busy talking about tessellations to notice! So he
gave them 5 silver pieces back. Well, 3 into 5 didn’t go in
nice tidy sort of way, so they took one silver piece each and
left the other 2 as a tip for the waiter.
Afterwards, Brasshead
started to worry about the arithmetic. (He’d never been the
soundest egg in the clutch, in Ironclaw’s far-from-humble
opinion.) The three brazzles had paid 9 silver pieces each;
that was 27 altogether. And 2 for the waiter made 29. Where
did the other one go?
Ironclaw soon put
Brasshead right, of course. What had he done wrong? Click on Ironclaw to find out.
|
