Maths Challenge Puzzle

Maths related puzzles can provide a simple and focussed challenge - performing mental arithmetic as quickly as you can without making mistakes can actually be quite good fun!

Here are three maths challenge puzzles for you, an easy, a moderate and a hard puzzle. See if you can do them within a minute. The level of these is very fair with only a gentle increase in difficulty at each stage, so none of the calculations expected are unreasonable such as calculating 37.5% of a number or squaring 34! If you want harder ones, let me know.

The Missing Link

Here is a fun word puzzle with various names, such as link word, chain word and so on.

All you need to do is find the one word that joins the word on the left and the word on the right to create new words or phrases in each case.

For instance, if you have something like this:

HAND ???? THING

… then the answer could be SOME to make HANDSOME and SOMETHING.

Here are three:

SHIP ??? STICK

VIE ???? SPAN

From A to Book Fair

Today I went to the London Book Fair. As usual it was pretty busy, and most people were moving from meeting to meeting or wandering around. Or queuing for food or drink.

Trying to move about efficiently with so many people getting in your way is pretty hard.

For todays puzzle, if you wanted to travel to five different stalls just once, how many possible combinations are there? And how does this increase with the more stalls you have to visit. Can you work out the formula for the number of possible routes you can take if you have to visit n stalls?

Going Bananas…

It is a not so well-known fact that the best day of the week to pick bananas is a Monday. Allegedly. How many reasons can you come up with as to why this might actually be true?

This is a lateral thinking puzzle, so no idea is necessarily too outlandish - feel free to post any reasons you come up with! But don’t drive yourself bananas thinking about it…

Mental Arithmetic Pays, Literally

You can barely see a newspaper these days without having your mental arithmetic skills challenged.  Under the guise of a ‘mental gym’ a ‘maths challenge’ or similar, we are presented with a series of sums to perform.

Depending on your choice of newspaper, these can be fairly easy or almost impossible to really do in your head.  However, there are occasions where maths pays, or at least being able to approximate totals.

At the supermarket today I bought six things, and the bill seemed too high at £15.49 for them.  On leaving the supermarket I double checked and realised it was £2.88 too high as they had charged twice for a battery, when I had only bought one.

So mental arithmetic, or at least approximating what the total would be in my head, saved me £2.88.  Here are the prices of what I actually bought - what would your approximation of the total of these be as you were going around?

Magazine: £3.25; Battery: £2.88, Greeting card: £1.49, Chocolates: £3.66, Pastry: £0.89, Paper: £0.60

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