IMPOSSIPUZZLES

1 Ted had been watching as Susan played with her marbles. “You’ve got a lot of blues,” he said. “Just a third of them are that colour.”

“My favourite, dad,” the girl replied. “A fifth of them are green, and a quarter are red.”

“Very methodical,” Ted laughed. “So that leaves you just thirteen others and they’re all yellow.”

How many marbles did she have there?

2

“The school bus looked half empty,” said Joan as the children came in.

“Yes, mum,” Dick told her. “But when I looked around I saw twice as many boys as girls.”

“Twice?” His sister shook her head. “I could see three times as many boys as girls when I looked around.” Believe it or not they were both right! How many boys were there?

3

“So you got the weights of those five boxes.” John seemed surprised. “How did you manage, when our machine doesn’t read under fifty?”

“It was easy,” Ron replied. “I weighed them all in threes, all of the possible combinations. That gave 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71 kilos. No trouble at all!”

What were the individual weights?

4

“We didn’t move far,” said Terry. “Only a short way down the road, and still in the low hundreds.”

Karen smiled. “So what’s the new number?”

“Something like the old one in a way,” Terry replied. “If you add the old and the new numbers, and multiply by their difference, you get one less than their product.”

So what were the numbers?