A woman lives in a skyscraper thirty-six floors high and is served by several elevators which stop at each floor going up and down. Each morning she leaves her apartment and goes to one of the elevators. Whichever one she takes is three times more likely to be going up than down. Why?
You are mixing a mixture of cement and Sand with five gallons of water. You have a garden hose giving you all the water you need. The problem is that you only have a four-gallon bucket and a seven-gallon bucket and neither has graduation marks. Find a method to measure five gallons.
Three men in a cafe order a meal the total cost of which is $15. They each contribute $5. The waiter takes the money to the chef who recognises the three as friends and asks the waiter to return $5 to the men.
The waiter is not only poor at mathematics but dishonest and instead of going to the trouble of splitting the $5 between the three he simply gives them $1 each and pockets the remaining $2 for himself.
Now, each of the men effectively paid $4, the total paid is therefore $12. Add the $2 in the waiters pocket and this comes to $14. Where has the other $1 gone from the original $15?
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.
