I recently received a card from a fellow co-worker/dear friend/wise mentor who reminded me that as a proud math/science geek I needed to help encourage others into the math/science geekdom. So with that charge in mind, I write my first math, science, and technology blog. Today it's a problem; next week it might be an interesting invention that catches my attention. If nothing else it will be a good way for me to keep up with my own professional community.
Although you could use some fancy mathematics to solve the following problem, it is not neccessary. Knowledge of operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and some time thinking is enough to solve it. Happy solving.
A man entered an apple orchard that had 7 guards and picked some apples. When he left, he gave the first guard half his apples and 1 apple more. To the second guard, he gave half his remaining apples and 1 more. He did the same to each of the remaining five guards and left the orchard with 1 apple. How many apples did he gather in all?
I'll leave the answer in the comments section.
3 comments:
The man had to start with 382 apples.
Grrrrrr.... I worked on this last night in between putting the kids to bed and haven't had time to revisit it.
I thought about leaving this comment on another post, so I wouldn't see the answer, but then realized it would bother me not to know.
So, what's the math behind it? How do you easily get to that answer? I am going to LOVE these Mondays because I LOVED math in high school. I actually thought about becoming a math teacher. (Did you know that?)
Got it baby. The number can be obtained by mulitplying the number of apples the Man ended up with by 2 and adding 2 to get the number of apples held by guard 7, the same for the number of apples held by Guard 6 and then continuing for Guard 5, 4, etc.
Fun Anna.
Love. Dad
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