Monday, October 5, 2009

Bella ate the candy

The math problem is solved!

In this morning's Cliff, I wrote about a math problem that stumped participants of a trivia contest last week. Reader Mark Steinman explained how organizers of Are You Smarter Than A Middle Schooler? got their answer.

"After assessing the problem for awhile, here’s MY explanation on why ‘48’ is the right answer.

If Bella gave 1/6 of her 48 candies to Jacob, that would mean 8 were provided leaving her with 40.

Then if Bella gave ¼ of the remaining 40 to Alice, that would mean 10 were provided leaving her with 30.

Then if Bella gave ½ of the remaining 30 to Edward, that would mean 15 were provided leaving her with 15.

And then I suspect, given it was candy, Bella ate one. That would leave 14!

48 is the ‘right’ answer!"

What do you think?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Probably a typo in the question.

Replace "if she had 14 pieces left" with "if she had 4 pieces left".....and the answer comes out to be:

48

hiprhyme said...

at best, a poorly worded question. what do the organizers say about how to calculate this?