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Many maths problems begin with the question “Is it possible…?”. In these kinds of problems, what you need to do depends on what you think is true.

  • If you believe it is possible, then you must give an example that really satisfies the conditions in the problem.

  • If you believe it is not possible, then you must explain clearly why it cannot be done.

When trying to build an example, it often helps to ask yourself extra questions to narrow things down: “How could it be possible?”, or “What properties must a correct example have?”.

On the other hand, if you have been trying to build an example for a while and nothing works, perhaps the answer is that it is impossible. In that case, look for a property that any example would need to have — and then show why that property cannot actually happen. Let’s see some examples!

Welcome back! We hope you all had a great summer and now you are ready for the new school year full of fun problems in mathematics. We decided to start with warm-up topic called dissections, so today we will cut various shapes into more elaborate geometric figures in order to reassemble them into a different shape.

The meeting of the secret agents took place in the green house.
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Considering the numbers in the windows of the green house, what should be drawn in the empty frame?
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Today we will practice to encrypt and decipher information using some of the most common codes. Majority of the codes in use can be alphabetic and numeric, namely one may want to encode a word, a phrase, or a number, or just any string of symbols using either letters, or numbers, or both. Some of the codes, however may use various other symbols to encrypt the information. To solve some of the problems you will need the correspondence between alphabet letters and numbers
0.85

@*26c@ A & B & C & D &E & F &G &H &I &J &K &L &M&N&O&P&Q&R&S&T&U&V&W&X&Y&Z
1 & 2 & 3&4&5&6&7&8&9&10&11&12&13&14&15&16&17&18&19&20&21&22&23&24&25&26

Find one way to encrypt letters of Latin alphabet as sequences of \(0\)s and \(1\)s, each letter corresponds to a sequence of five symbols.

Pinoccio keeps his Golden Key in the safe that is locked with a numerical password. For secure storage of the Key he replaced some digits in the password by letters (in such a way that different letters substitute different digits). After replacement Pinoccio got the password \(QUANTISED17\). Honest John found out that:
• the number \(QUANTISED\) is divisible by all integers less than 17, and
• the difference \(QUA-NTI\) is divisible by \(7\).
Could he find the password?

Using the representation of Latin alphabet as sequences of \(0\)s and \(1\)s five symbols long, encrypt your first and last name.

Decipher the quote from Philip Pullmans "His Dark Materials":
Erh csy wlepp orsa xli xvyxl, erh xli xvyxl wlepp qeoi csy jvii.
The same letters correspond to the same in the phrase, different letters correspond to different. We know that no original letters stayed in place, meaning that in places of e,r,h there was surely something else.

Decipher the quote from "Alice in Wonderland" from the following matrix:
\[\begin{array}{@{}*{26}{c}@{}} Y&q&o&l&u&e&c&d&a&i&n \\ w&a&r&l&a&w&e&a&t&y&k \\ s&n&t&c&a&e&k&c&e&a&m \\ t&o&d&r&w&e&a&t&a&h&r \\ a&c&n&t&n&e&o&d&t&r&h \\ n&i&d&n&l&g&m&e&x&s&z \end{array}\]

Decipher the following quote from Alice in Wonderland:
Lw zrxog eh vr qlfh li vrphwklqj pdgh vhqvh iru d fkdqjh.
The same letters correspond to the same in the phrase, different letters correspond to different. We know that no original letters stayed in place, meaning that in places of e,r,h there was surely something else.