In a bookcase, there are four volumes of the collected works of Astrid Lindgren, with each volume containing 200 pages. A worm who lives on this bookshelf has gnawed its way from the first page of the first volume to the last page of the fourth volume. Through how many pages has the worm gnawed its way through?
When Gulliver came to Lilliput, he found that there all things were exactly 12 times shorter than in his homeland. Can you say how many Lilliputian matchboxes fit into one of Gulliver’s matchboxes?
Three hedgehogs divided three pieces of cheese of mass of 5g, 8g and 11g. The fox began to help them. It can cut off and eat 1 gram of cheese from any two pieces at the same time. Can the fox leave the hedgehogs equal pieces of cheese?
Gerard says: the day before yesterday I was 10 years old, and next year I will turn 13. Can this be?
Henry did not manage to get into the elevator on the first floor of the building and decided to go up the stairs. It takes 2 minutes to rise to the third floor. How long does it take to rise to the ninth floor?
A piece fell out of a book, the first page of which is the number 439, and the number of the last page is written with those same numbers in some other order. How many pages are in the fallen out piece?
10 people collected a total of 46 mushrooms in a forest. It is known that no two people collected the same number of mushrooms. How many mushrooms did each person collect?
Upon the installation of a keypad lock, each of the 26 letters located on the lock’s keypad is assigned an arbitrary natural number known only to the owner of the lock. Different letters do not necessarily have different numbers assigned to them. After a combination of different letters, where each letter is typed once at most, is entered into the lock a summation is carried out of the corresponding numbers to the letters typed in. The lock opens only if the result of the summation is divisible by 26. Prove that for any set of numbers assigned to the 26 letters, there exists a combination that will open the lock.
The key of the cipher, called the “swivelling grid”, is a stencil made from a square sheet of chequered paper of size \(n \times n\) (where \(n\) is even). Some of the cells are cut out. One side of the stencil is marked. When this stencil is placed onto a blank sheet of paper in four possible ways (marked side up, right, down or left), its cut-outs completely cover the entire area of the square, where each cell is found under the cut-out exactly once. The letters of the message, that have length \(n^2\), are successively written into the cut-outs of the stencil, where the sheet of paper is placed on a blank sheet of paper with the marked side up. After filling in all of the cut-outs of the stencil with the letters of the message, the stencil is placed in the next position, etc. After removing the stencil from the sheet of paper, there is an encrypted message.
Find the number of different keys for an arbitrary even number \(n\).
A message is encrypted by replacing the letters of the source text with pairs of digits according to some table (known only to the sender and receiver) in which different letters of the alphabet correspond to different pairs of digits. The cryptographer was given the task to restore the encrypted text. In which case will it be easier for him to perform the task: if it is known that the first word of the second line is a “thermometer” or that the first word of the third line is “smother”? Justify your answer. (It is assumed that the cryptographic table is not known).