You have two egg-timers -- a four-minute timer and a
seven-minute timer.
These are hourglasses which contain sand.
Explain how you can cook an ear of corn for 9 minutes. (Tell when you would turn over the timers, when you would start cooking the ear of corn, when it would be done, etc.).
Solution:
There are several solutions to this problem.
Here is one of them:
Start cooking the corn and turn over both timers.
After the 4-minute timer runs out, turn it over.
After the 7-minute timer runs out, turn it over.
When the 4-minute timer runs out the second time,
turn over the 7-minute timer (which has 1 minute of
sand in it).
After the sand runs out in the
7-minute timer, 9 minutes will have elapsed and the
corn will be done.
7 min 1 min 1 min |----------------------------|----|----| 4 min 4 min |----------------|----------------| 9 min |<------------------------------------>|
Correctly solved by:
1. Tom Marino | Winchester, VA |
2. Jia Ran | Rome, Italy |
3. Court Pifer | Winchester, VA |
4. Bill Brown | Winchester, VA |
5. Chip Crawford | Winchester, VA |
6. Jonathan Pence | Winchester, VA |