Cheap Charlie likes to smoke cigars.
He cannot afford cigars so he puts five stubs (which he finds) together to make one full cigar.

One day Charlie was lucky to get 25 stubs.

How many cigars could he smoke?

For a bonus point; how many cigars could he have smoked if he had only found 20 stubs?

Since Cheap Charlie really only needs to use 4/5 of each cigar for it to count as a "full cigar", we need only to divide 25/5 cigars by 4/5.  This is 25/4, or 6.25 cigars.  Similarly, he would smoke 20/5 cigars divided by 4/5 for the second case.  This is exactly 5 cigars.

The only way for this to really work out in real life though, as e.g. said, is if Cheap borrows stubs and gives them back.  In the second case, Cheap would need to borrow a stub and make a cigar to smoke, then give back the stub left over.  In the first case, Cheap would need to borrow four stubs, then smoke 1/5 of the cigar, or 1/4 of the amount he would normally get from each cigar.  Then, Cheap would return the rest of the cigar.

Posted by Tristan on 2004-03-14 15:09:17