Words Of Wisdom on 16 July 2008
| Kasz216 said: I've got a good math riddle. Either it will take you like, 5 minutes...(like it did me.) Or it could take a day or even longer to figure it out. (like it did everyone else in my highschool math class.) You have 10 stacks of coins that each have 10 coins in each stack. Each coin weighs 1 Kilogram. Except for one stack of coins that instead weighs 2Kilograms each. You have a scale, however you can only use it once. How do you figure out which stack has the coins that weigh 2 Kilograms? |
One truth prevails.
Take 1 coin from the first stack, 2 coins from the 2nd stack, 3 coins from the 3rd stack...etc and put them all on the scale.
If they all weighed 1 kilogram each, the total weight would be 55 kilograms. The number of kilograms the weight is off corresponds to the stack that is 2 kilograms.
56 = 1st column.
57 = 2nd column.
...etc.
