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Icin' the Tea (Posted on 2004-03-09) Difficulty: 1 of 5
This actually happened to me...

  My wife and I were cookin' a Cajun feast for the anniversaire de ma mere. While I handled the vittles, the lovely and talented Mrs. Boy made the drinks.
  She had made the tea strong and wanted to dilute it with 4 cups of water but the guests were at the door and the tea was still hot so she decided to dilute it with ice instead.
  She turned to me and said, "Fat, sweetie, how many ice cubes make a cup of water?"
  I confessed that I did not know as I had not measured the water when I made the cubes. To make matters worse I had not paid attention to how full I had made the trays so we couldn't just refill them and see how much they held.
  Things seemed desperate, as I'd die before I'd serve my Gumbo without sweet tea, but Mrs. Boy is no fool and she found a way. The tea was just right (though the cheese grits were a little burnt).

How did Mrs. B manage to ascertain the proper number of ice cubes to produce the 4 cups of water needed to dilute the tea? All she had to use was the ice cubes themselves, an ungraduated glass pitcher of unknown volume and the 4 cup graduated Pyrex measuring cup full of (too strong) tea.

See The Solution Submitted by FatBoy    
Rating: 3.3333 (6 votes)

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No Subject | Comment 30 of 38 |
When water freezes, it expands in volume by 9%, making ice less dense than water, which is why 90% of an iceberg lies below the surface. So, in this case, four cups of liquid tea require 4.4 cups of ice cubes.

Since ice cubes are irregular in shape, one must determine their volume by seeing how much they displace in a liquid. One way to measure out 4.4 cups of ice (which ignores the melting of the ice) is to

1) pour 3 cups of concentrate into the ungraduated pitcher;

2) add enough ice to the 1 cup of remaining concentrate tin the measuring cup to make 2.1 cups of tea/ice

3) Remove the ice only and put it into the ungraduated pitcher;

4) Repeat 2) & 3) three times, the last time pouring all into the ungraduated pitcher.

This is not a very elegant solution, but it does take into account the expansion of water when freezing.

  Posted by Michael Aquino on 2004-04-27 21:43:41
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