Problems

Age
Difficulty
Found: 26

Robinson found a chest with books and instruments after the ship wreck. Not all the books were in readable condition, but some of the books he managed to read. One sentence read “72 chickens cost *619* p”. (The starred digits were not readable). He has not tasted a chicken for quite some time, and it was pleasant to imagine a properly cooked chicken in front of him. He also was able to decipher the cost of one chicken. Can you?

Jack believes that he can place \(99\) integers in a circle such that for each pair of neighbours the ratio between the larger and smaller number is a prime. Can he be right?

In a herd consisting of horses and camels (some with one hump and some with two) there are a total of 200 humps. How many animals are in the herd, if the number of horses is equal to the number of camels with two humps?

Prove the magic trick for the number \(1089 = 33^2\): if you take any \(3\)-digit number \(\overline{abc}\) with digits coming in strictly descending order and subtract from it the number obtained by reversing the digits of the original number \(\overline{abc} - \overline{cba}\) you get another \(3\)-digit number, call it \(\overline{xyz}\). Then, no matter which number you started with, the sum \(\overline{xyz} + \overline{zyx} = 1089\).
Recall that a number \(\overline{abc}\) is divisible by \(11\) if and only if \(a-b+c\) also is.

Katie and Charlotte had \(4\) sheets of paper. They cut some of the sheets into \(4\) pieces. They then cut some of the newly obtained papersheets also into \(4\) pieces. They did this several more times, cutting a piece of paper into \(4\). In the end they counted the number of sheets. Could this number be \(2024\)?

A monkey becomes happy when they eat three different fruits. What is the largest number of monkeys that can become happy with \(20\) pears, \(30\) bananas, \(40\) peaches and \(50\) tangerines?

Is it possible to construct a 485 × 6 table with the integers from 1 to 2910 such that the sum of the 6 numbers in each row is constant, and the sum of the 485 numbers in each column is also constant?

Ms Jones vacuums her car every 2 days, she washes her car every 7 days and polishes it every 52 days. The last time she did all three types of cleaning on one day was on the 13th of March last year. What time will she do it again?

The numbers \(a\) and \(b\) are integers and \(a>b\). Show that the gcd of \(a\) and \(b\) is equal to the gcd of \(b\) and \(a-b\).

A brave witch is out there hunting monsters for coin. She noticed that every 5th monster she encounters has wings, every 16th has a fiery breath, every 6th has fangs and every 14th has a pile of treasure. Now, the only monster with wings, fiery breath, fangs and a pile of treasure is a dragon and witches don’t hunt dragons. Assuming that the witch has just met a dragon, how many monsters will she have to hunt to meet another one?