From a collection of entertaining puzzles (details TBD later) I have chosen 2 easy puzzles, diff. level 1, maybe 1.5.
You are free to solve them or not, but my question is whether from the prices mentioned in the text you will be able to deduce the year of book's publication.
Here we go:
#79 At the meat market
"That's right, lady. Only 88 cents a pound. This one weighs 3/5 of it's weight plus 3/5 of a pound.
What was the price?
# 53 A Special Occasion
"It's OK with your buddies, but you don't take me to places like that" said Ann. "What did it cost you?"
Mike chuckled. "Come on, you know it was our annual reunion," he replied. "The dinner came to only $99.97 for the lot, so we were able to split it equally among all of us."
What had it cost him then?
Rem. $ dollars are USD.
Try to recover the year of publication of the book and justify your answer.
As the problem mentions, the solutions are almost trivial for most current users of this site but here we are:
#79: Set up the equation w=(3/5)w+3/5
solution weight=1.5 pounds
#53: 9997 is a semiprime equal to 13*769 so presumably the answer is that 13 people each paid $7.69 as that's the only way to split perfectly equally.
As to the year: 88 cents per pound sounds inexpensive for a chicken and 1.5 pounds is a small one at that. On the other hand, the wholesale cost of chicken breast was 88 cents as recently as 2018 https://www.dispatch.com/story/business/2018/12/26/chicken-prices-at-all-time/6556185007/
$7.69 apiece for a dinner party also seems low, but we don't know where they went. If drinks were not included, this price could be achieved no too long ago.
I recently found a 2003 Chinese restaurant menu and many entrees were still in the $8-10 range.
I have a good collection of old puzzle books, and I know these algebra type problems were more popular long ago. I'm thinking Sam Lloyd and Dudeney up to maybe the 1980's. More recent books have a lot more pictures.
As usual Google came to the rescue. Entering the full text of #53 returns:
https://books.google.com/books?id=6bDIFdiK9yQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
<h1 class="gb-volume-title" dir="ltr" style="font-size: 11.869px; margin: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Entertaining Mathematical Teasers and how to Solve Them</h1>By James Alston Hope Hunter
The book is a collection of puzzles from the author's syndicated column and published in 1983. The title of the column is "Fun with Figures." This title rings a bell, but I couldn't locate such a book in my collection. It might be back in my office.
Anyhow the information in the problems is consistent with prices and puzzles from the 1970's and 80's.
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Posted by Jer
on 2023-11-04 12:59:56 |
Long winded Solution
