But if you want to juggle your time in some other way then consider this instead: A person has to transport three balls across the river on a raft in a single crossing.

 

E4

Consider the following words:

’Orses, Dawn, Yourself, Payment, Peron, Vescence, Police, Retirement, An Eye, E. Chaucer, Sutherland, Leather, Sis, Sir, Population, Relief, Tickets, Conan Doyle, Williams, Mation, Ia, La France, A Match?, Breakfast, Mistress, Marx Brothers.

So what could be the link between them? Well, remember A for apple, B for ball, C for cat, etc? It’s the same principle working here. The first is ’ay for ’orses (as in ‘hay for horses’); B for Dawn (before dawn); C for Yourself (see for yourself); D for Payment (defer payment); E for Peron (Eva Peron, wife of Argentine President Juan Perón); F for Vescence (effervescence); G for Police (chief of police); etc. Finish the rest on your own now, but keep in mind it’s tough — especially W — as I found out when I first laid my eyeballs on the selfsame list.

But if you want to juggle your time in some other way then consider this instead: A person has to transport three balls across the river on a raft in a single crossing. However, the raft can only sustain the maximum weight of the traveller plus two of the balls. The person being clever (?), decides to reduce the force of the balls on the raft by juggling them continuously during the entire crossing so that he or she will not be holding them all at once and at least one of the balls would be in the air. Can this be done?

DEAR MS

(The problem was: “The letters of each of the following words can be rearranged to give the name of an animal. (1) Corona; (2) Cabaret; (3) Paroled; (4) Retirer; (5) Les-ions; (6) Someday; (7) Chai-ned; (8) Untrace; (9) Alp-ines; (10) Outhears; (11) Orchestra; (12) Californian” — MS)

Centaur-Sticky-Dept:

In the names of animals, I find Racoon, Bearcat, Leopard, Terrier, Lioness, Samoyed, Echidna, Centaur, Spaniel, House Rat, Carthorse and African lion. There is no problem about 11 of them, but the inclusion of the supposedly half-animal centaur is amusing.

• Abhay Prakash, abhayprakash@hotmail.com

(1) Racoon; (2) Bearcat; (3) Leopard; (4) Terrier; (5) Lioness; (6) Samoyed; (7) Echidna; (8) Centaur; (9) Spaniel: (10) House rat; (11) Cart horse; (12) African Lion

• Murali S L, murali_sl@yahoo.co.in

(The other problem was to figure out why using one of the kids’ spectacles in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, to light a fire was logically wrong. — MS)

Fire-Extinguished-Dept:

The problem in the scenario is that the boy was suffering from myopia, hence he had corrective glasses to see distant things — and not reading glasses. Now, it’s reading glasses that magnify the image or help in making fire and, as this boy did not have such glasses, there was no way he could make fire.

• Akshit Chaturvedi, akshit0201@gmail.com  

 (The last problem was: “A long strip of paper is twisted several times before its ends are joined. Find two ways of telling if the number of twists is odd or even.” — MS)

Mobius-Twists-Dept:

A strip with an odd number of twists will have one surface and one edge; while a strip twisted an even number of times will have two surfaces and two edges. Cut the strip in half along its length. The strip with odd twists will result in a single longer strip with twice as many twists plus two more twists, while the strip with even twists will form two linked strips with the same number of twists.

• Saifuddin S F Khomosi, saif_sfk@hotmail.com

 ENDGAME(S)

1.   What do LATVIAN, CAPTION, LOOTED, PINEAL, LATRINE, LEEDS, REIGNS and UNALERT have in common? (Okay, okay... CAPTION and UNALERT are clues.)

2.   Three volumes of a book — I, II and III — are kept together vertically on a bookshelf. Each volume &is one inch thick. The thickness of the covers is negligible. A worm bores through the first page of the first volume to the last page of the last volume. What is the distance travelled by the worm?

• Commodore K M Thomas (Retd), couttola@gmail.com 

(To get in touch with Mukul, mail him at mukul.mindsport@gmail.com)

• Mindsport