You've been placed on a course of expensive medication in which you are to take one tablet of medicine A and one tablet of medicine B daily.

You must be careful that you take just one of each because taking more of either can have serious side effects. Taking an A without taking a B, or vice versa, can also be very serious, because they must be taken together in order to be effective. In summary, you must take exactly one of the A pills and one of the B pills at one time.

Therefore, you open up the A bottle, and you tap one A pill into your hand. You put that bottle aside and you open the B bottle. You do the same, but by mistake, two Bs fall into your hand with the A pill.

Now, here's the problem. You weren't watching your hand as the pills fell into it, so you can't tell the A pill apart from the two B pills. The pills look identical. They are the same size, same weight, same color, same everything, and they are not marked differently in any way. What are you going to do? You cannot tell which pill is which, and you cannot afford to throw them away and start over again.

How do you get your daily dose of exactly one A and exactly one B without wasting any of the pills?

cut each pill in half. then eat three 1/2 pills ensuring that you dont eat two halves of the same pill. you will then have eaten 1 B pill and 1/2 of an A pill and you will be left with 2 halves a B pill and one half of an A pill. then take another A pill from the bottle and cut it in half and eat one half. then you will have eaten one A pill and 1 B pill. You will be left with two halves of an A pill and 2 halves of a B pill. Store them and eat them tomorrow.

Posted by kibibi on 2004-04-21 03:44:03