You are a prisoner sentenced to death. The Emperor offers you a chance to live by playing a simple game. He gives you 50 black marbles, 50 white marbles, and 2 empty bowls. He then says, 'Divide these 100 marbles into these 2 bowls. You can divide them any way you like as long as you use all the marbles. Then I will blindfold you and mix the bowls around. You then can choose one bowl and remove ONE marble. If the marble is WHITE you will live, but if the marble is BLACK... you will die.'
How do you divide the marbles up so that you have the greatest probability of choosing a WHITE marble?
In a school, there are four subjects. Seventy percent of students study English, seventy five percent of students study Science, eighty five percent of students study Mathematics and eighty percent of students study Spanish.
Can you calculate the percentage of students that study all four subjects?
My first is in chocolate but not in ham. My second is in cake and also in jam. My third at tea time is easily found. Altogether, this is a friend who is often around. What is it?
You are a cab driver who pools passengers. You pick 3 people from a destination and drop 1 after an hour. 2 people climb aboard at the same time and you drop 3 at the next destination. After some time, you pick 2 passengers only to drop 1 after a short distance where 3 more passengers climb up the cab. You leave the rest of the passengers one by one to their destination and then come back home.
A man always keeps a spare tyre in his car. To make full use of all the five tyres, he changes the tyres in a manner that for a distance of 1, 00,000 km, each of them runs the same distance.
Can you calculate the distance travelled by each tyre on that journey?
In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.