Bob is having a nice camping/fishing trip along a river. He leaves his campsite early in the morning, and gets on his boat, heading full throttle upstream.

After going for exactly one mile, his hat flips off of his head, and starts floating downstream. Bob doesn't realize that his hat has fallen off for five minutes, but then he notices that it's missing, and turns full throttle downstream.

He finally catches the hat at exactly the same spot as he camped that morning. The question is, how fast was the water traveling?

(Assume that he travels the same speed the entire time and that there is no turn around time.)

(In reply to Multiple Solutions? by DJ)

If the river is going 1 mile per minute, the hat would travel downstream five miles in the five minutes before Bob turned around. However, since he was only 1 mile upstream from camp when this happened, the hat would already be 4 miles downstream past camp before Bob turned around.....

Posted by Ryan on 2003-05-06 18:48:47