Everyone knows that to lose weight you have to lose more calories than you take in. (A calorie incidentally is the amount of heat required to raise one gram or one cc of water by one degree Celsius.

E4

Here’s a problem which may be humorous, but apparently doesn’t have a solution, except that it does and only people who know it know that. (Obviously, otherwise how would they even know it?) So may I, for the first time in this column, please request such people not to spoil the fun for the others and write in with correct answers? This means only people who don’t know the answers should do so. (Boy, what a ploy and a half!)

Everyone knows that to lose weight you have to lose more calories than you take in. (A calorie incidentally is the amount of heat required to raise one gram or one cc of water by one degree Celsius. So pour yourself a cold sugared drink with lots of ice cubes in it. Let’s say that’s about 200 grams or 200 cc. Remember the temperature of the drink would be zero degrees Celsius since the ice is melting. Next, do a bottoms up at one go.

Your body has to now supply heat to raise that 200 grams to body temperature which would be about 37 degrees Celsius on average. Meaning it has to supply 200 x 37 = 7,400 calories whereas a sugared drink has only about 100 calories on average. In other words, you should be able to just hang around all day and wolf flagons of cold sugared drinks down and yet lose weight like crazy, right? Why doesn’t that happen?

DEAR MS

MonuMental-Solutions-Dept:

The distance between the monuments is exactly the radius of the circular park — 5 miles. From the figure obtained, it can be seen that the line showing the distance between the monuments and radius drawn to the western end of the park from where the boy started moving towards the south again are diagonals of a rectangle.

• Ramesh,rameshkumarthayyil@gmail.com

Regarding the (non-) Pythagoras problem the answer is 5 miles. When the boy has reached the edge, he is 5 miles from the centre of the park. When he reaches the second monument, he basically forms a rectangle with both the monuments at opposite corners to each other (diagonally) while the edge of the park and the centre are at the other two corners. Since the diagonals are equal, the distance between the two monuments is 5 miles.

• Ibrar-ul-Samad, vjibi_94@hotmail.com

(The other problem was: “When you light a gas stove why doesn’t the flame travel from the burner to the cylinder via the pipe and instead stays only at the burner?” — MS)

Flaming-Out-Dept:

For the flame to travel from the burner to the cylinder via the pipe, the fire triangle comprising of oxygen, heat and fuel must be completed within the pipe. The triangle cannot be completed because pure fuel from the cylinder flows through the pipe at a low pressure. This pressure prevents the oxygen from the air entering the pipe and the heat, which is generated from the flame, cannot enter because hot air rises upwards, thereby dissipating the heat into the surroundings above the flame. Nonavailability of oxygen and heat inside the pipe does not allow the triangle to complete, thereby confining the flame to the burner.

• Shashi Shekher Thakur, shashishekher@yahoo.com

ENDGAME(S)

1. Here’s an interesting twist to an old problem where the reason for your answer turns out to be more of a hassle than the answer itself. A bear was once loitering near the edge of a cliff and suddenly slipped and fell down 20 m in two seconds. What was the colour of the bear?

2. It’s easy to get a shelled hard-boiled egg inside a wide-necked bottle. All you do is drop a burning taper inside and place the egg on the mouth and wait. Atmospherics does the rest. The question is: how do you get it inside the bottle with its shell intact. Or for that matter, how can you get the insides of an egg out without breaking its shell?

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

• Mindsport