Problems

Age
Difficulty
Found: 1974

It is known that any person has at most 400,000 hairs on their head. Given that the population of London is not less than 8 million, prove that there are 20 Londoners with the same number of hairs on their heads.

Hannah has 10 employees. Each month, Hannah raises the salary by 1 pound of exactly nine of her employees (of her choice). How can Hannah raise the salaries to make them equal? (Salaries are an integer number of pounds.)

Three friends decide, by a coin toss, who goes to get the juice. They have one coin. How do they arrange coin tosses so that all of them have equal chances to not have to go and get the juice?

26 numbers are chosen from the numbers 1, 2, 3, ..., 49, 50. Will there always be two numbers chosen whose difference is 1?

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).

A straight corridor of length 100 m is covered with 20 rugs that have a total length of 1 km. The width of each rug is equal to the width of the corridor. What is the longest possible total length of corridor that is not covered by a rug?

In one urn there are two white balls, in another two black ones, in the third – one white and one black. On each urn there was a sign indicating its contents: WW, BB, WB. Someone rehung the signs so that now each sign indicating the contents of the urn is incorrect. It is possible to remove a ball from any urn without looking into it. What is the minimum number of removals required to determine the composition of all three urns?

Around a table sit boys and girls. Prove that the number of pairs of neighbours of different sexes is even.

Could the difference of two integers multiplied by their product be equal to the number 1999?

a) There are 21 coins on a table with the tails side facing upwards. In one operation, you are allowed to turn over any 20 coins. Is it possible to achieve the arrangement were all coins are facing with the heads side upwards in a few operations?

b) The same question, if there are 20 coins, but you are allowed to turn over 19.