During a break, a class of 7 children sit in a circle around their teacher to play a game. The teacher has a bag of 12 sweets and wishes to hand them all out. Knowing that some children will get more than others, he has devised this game to distribute them 'fairly'. He walks clockwise close to the children and hands out the sweets to some of them according to the following rule. He selects one child and gives him a sweet, then he skips the next child and gives a sweet to the next one, then he skips 2 and gives a sweet to the next one, then he skips 3, and so on.
After he has handed out all the sweets, the children look bemused - the game hasn't really worked very well! How many of the children end up with no sweets at all?
}
This space is here to avoid seeing the answers before trying the problem!
}
If you enjoy using this website then please consider making a donation - every little helps :-)
You can receive these questions directly to your email box or read them in an RSS reader. Subscribe using the links on the right.
Don’t forget to follow Gifted Mathematics on Google+, Facebook or Twitter. You may add your own interesting questions on our Google+ Community and Facebook..
You can also subscribe to our Bookmarks on StumbleUpon and Pinterest. Many resources never make it onto the pages of Gifted Mathematics but are stored in these bookmarking websites to share with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment