1) Imagine a large sheet of rice paper one-thousandth of an inch thick. Tear it in half and stack the pieces, then tear the stack in half and stack those, and so on. If you could do this 50 times in succession, how tall would the final stack be?
2) Jack bought 100 pieces of fruit for $8. He bought apples, peaches and pears. Apples cost 5 cents each, peaches 7 cents, and pears 9 cents. How many more pears than apples did Jack buy?
The answers to July’s puzzles were supplied in the July issue.
Here are the answers to August’s puzzles:
1) Take 2 to the power of 50 and multiply the result by 0.001 inches/ply
= (1.12589991 × 1012) inches
= 17,769,884.9 miles
2) Jack spent $1 more than the 7 cent average per piece of fruit. Because each apple is 2 cents below the average and each pear is 2 cents above, he must have bought 50 more pears than apples.
