Mathematics, is the language of numbers. It is the abstract science of digits, quantity, and space, either as abstract concepts or as applied to other disciplines such as physics and engineering.
Math puzzles have specific rules but don’t always involve examinations or competitions. To solve puzzles, the solver must find a solution that satisfies the given conditions.
In other words, mathematical puzzles require mathematical intellect and knowledge to solve them.
Riddles based on numbers can take seconds to solve. But some are tricky enough to keep you engaged all day or even a week.
If you think you are a Math Whiz, you’d want to try this set of 10 riddles that will challenge your knowledge of numbers and mathematical rules.
Riddle 1: One brother says of his younger brother: “Two years ago, I was three times as old as my brother was. In three years’ time, I will be twice as old as my brother.” How old are they each now?
Riddle 2: In a certain country ½ of 5 = 3. If the same proportion holds, what is the value of 1/3 of 10?
Riddle 3: Add eight 8s to get the number 1,000. You can only use addition.
Riddle 4: A merchant can place 8 large boxes or 10 small boxes into a carton for shipping. In one shipment, he sent a total of 96 boxes. If there are more large boxes than small boxes, how many cartons did he ship?
Riddle 5: If 9999 = 4, 8888 = 8, 1816 = 6, 1212 = 0, then 1919 = ?
Riddle 6: What single digit appears most frequently between and including the numbers 1 and 1,000?
Riddle 7: If a hen and a half lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many eggs will half a dozen hens lay in half a dozen days?
Riddle 8: A small number of cards has been lost from a complete pack. If I deal among four people, three cards remain. If I deal among three people, two remain and if I deal among five people, two cards remain. How many cards are there?
Riddle 9: You know 2 + 2 comes to the same as 2 x 2. Now find a set of three different whole numbers whose sum is equal to their total when multiplied. (Answer – 1, 2, and 3)
Riddle 10: What is the smallest whole number that is equal to seven times the sum of its digits? (Answer – 21).
Here are the answers:
1. Older brother is 17 and the younger brother is 7.
Ears can pick up sounds, but so can teeth! Why not try it out yourself!
What you will need
Metal Fork
Metal Spoon
What to do
With your thumb and index finger, hold a metal fork gently by the middle of the handle.
Bang a metal spoon against the tine end of the fork and you will hear a little sound.
As the sound fades, put the fork’s handle between your front teeth and grip it (gently!) with your teeth. Don’t
let your lips or tongue touch it. You’ll hear a sound again, through your teeth!
Why do you think this happens? Think of your own best answer, then read our explanation below.
How it Works
Solid things, like teeth, carry sound better than air does. Your teeth pick up the vibrations that are still in the fork but are too faint for your ears to hear.
Have you ever wondered where the names of the colors come from? The Universal colors are of course black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. Live Science points out that these are the primary colors seen and named in various cultures. This may be because people see the wavelengths of these colors first. Of course, not every culture has names for even the primary colors.
Black and white seem to be the most common colors, with terms relating to them across most cultures and countries. Even in cultures with 11 basic colors, like the United States, it’s often only the basics that are named. But there are many colors which have derived their names from all sorts of places—from people, food, and drink items, to other languages, animals and bugs, nature and plants, and anything people can think up to call a color. Some have strange names, and some have elegant ones. Find below a few interesting colors-
Alice Blue: This is a pale grayish-blue color that may be named after Alice Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s oldest daughter. It’s actual origin isn’t confirmed, however.
Cerise: Cerise, a color also known as “Fashion Fuchsia,” gets its name from the French meaning of the word.
Cerise means cherry. The color is described as a deep reddish-pink.
Fuchsia: The original fuchsia color gets its name from the flower of the fuchsia plant. The plants itself got its name from a botanist in the sixteenth century, Leonhard Fuchs.
Prussian Blue: Another color with multiple names, Prussian Blue, is also known as Berlin Blue. The color was initially discovered in Berlin but was then used to color the uniforms of the Prussian army.
Puce: Puce is French for flea, the bug that torments household pets, and wild animals. The reddish-brown color resembles that of the nuisance insect. The bug and the name of the color both sound gross.
Tyrian Purple: Royal Purple is another name for Tyrian Purple, a color named for the city of Tyre by the ancient Phoenicians. The “Royal” moniker comes from the fact that the color was expensive and only the wealthy were able to afford it.
Zinnwaldite: Zinnwaldite is named for the beige mineral that shares its shade.
In a Sydney school, children were not permitted to perform cartwheels without the direct supervision of a trained gymnastics instructor.
19
In China, older kids are allowed a thirty minute naps
While it’s not uncommon for Kindergarteners to take quick naps, in China, they allow for older students to take thirty-minute naps. Studies have shown a short nap can improve memory and performance in school.
18
Dodgeball banned in schools
Schools in New Hampshire have banned dodgeball and other “human target” sports, pointing to bullying and violence as main reasons.
17
Nebraska schools tell teachers to call kids “Purple Penguins”
In an attempt to be gender inclusive, Nebraska schools required teachers not to call their students “boys” and “girls,” but “Purple Penguins” or other gender-neutral names that include everyone.
If you think this is over the top, wait until you see number 2!
16
New Jersey school banned bikes
Despite the health benefits of kids riding their bikes to school, New Jersey schools banned bikes, citing safety and liability issues.
15
Pennsylvania school banned Ugg boots
Though it may seem like a style ban at first, the Pennsylvania schools banned Ugg boots because girls were smuggling banned cell phones in them.
14
High fives and hugs are not allowed
A California junior high school principal banned all high fives and hugs despite an uproar from students. She said students should keep their hands to themselves.
13
Frisco, TX school bans Christmas
Nicholas Elementary School in Frisco, TX has banned Christmas and any other religious holiday. They specifically noted no Christmas trees or the colors red and green at their winter party. The reason? to avoid offending anyone.
12
In France, ketchup isn’t allowed in school.
In an effort to protect their culture from becoming “too American,” French schools banned ketchup from being put on any food except french fries.
11
In the UK, best friends are banned
Wanting to encourage children to play in larger groups, schools in the UK have banned “best friends,” hoping it would protect children from the trauma of having break ups with close friends.
10
Japan schools ban good luck bracelets
Japan schools only allow one good luck bracelet, anything greater than that is considered cheating. Apparently, there is such a thing as too much good luck.
9
School restricts bathroom breaks to three times a week
A New York school teacher limited her student’s bathroom breaks to three times a week, handing out coupons they can use. They get three minutes, and if they lose the coupons, then they’re going to have to hold it for quite a while.
8
School bans showing collarbones
Stephanie Hughes, a high school student in Kentucky, was sent home for violating the dress code and showing her collarbone. Supposedly, the school doesn’t want girls distracting the male students.
7
Teachers in UK can’t use red ink to grade papers
Stating the color red is too negative, teachers in UK are banned from using it to grade their papers and must use a more calming color instead.
6
A school bans LOL in yearbooks
A school in Georgia banned acronyms like “LOL” and asked students to sign a pledge saying they would respect their yearbooks and not write in them with those kinds of words.
5
Toronto school banned balls
After a parent received a concussion from being hit in the head with a ball, a Toronto principal banned hard balls, saying that they are too dangerous.
4
School bans running at recess
For kids, running and playing at recess is a necessity after sitting in a classroom for a long time. Unfortunately for kids at an unnamed school, a “no running policy” had been put in place. While the school’s reason is to keep the kids safe, this rule has to be one of the top 10 dumbest school rules ever.
3
ISIS schools require gender segregation
While Iraq is under ISIS control, the University of Mosul has been ordered to have gender segregation. They’ve also imposed severe changes to the curriculum, imposing Sharia Law and removing all hints of Iraqi nationalism and culture.
2
Students banned from announcing college acceptance
In an effort to protect their students’ feelings, several prep schools in New York have banned students from announcing whether or not they’ve been accepted into college.
1
Winning banned at schools
Speaking of not hurting anyone’s feelings, a new study shows that two out of three schools in the UK are rewarding all students rather than handing out awards to the students who actually win at something.
Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola products, started out in the late 1800s making the color pigment for the paint used on the common red barns in rural America. Binney & Smith’s carbon black was used by the Goodrich tire company to make automobile tires black and more durable. Originally, tires were white, the natural color of rubber.Crayons got their name from Edwin Binney’s wife, Alice. She combined the words craie (French for chalk) with the first part of the word oleaginous (the oily paraffin wax) to make the word “crayola.”
The two basic ingredients for a crayon are:
Pigment
Paraffin wax, stored in heated 17,000 gallon tanks
The mixture is heated until it melts into a liquid. Crayons melt at 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). The mixture is heated to 190 F (82 C). The liquid is poured into a preheated mold full of hundreds of crayon-shaped holes. Cool water (55 F, 13 C) is used to cool the mold, allowing the crayon to be made in 3 to 9 minutes.
A single mold makes 1,200 crayons at a time, weighing a total of about 40 pounds. The operator uses hydraulic pressure to eject the crayons from the mold. Earlier mold designs used a hand crank to push up the crayons. The just-molded crayons are then manually quality checked for imperfections and inspected for broken tips. The excess wax from the mold and any rejected crayons are recycled to be re-melted.
There are 120 different colors of Crayola Crayons.
Homework was invented by Roberto Nevilis in 1095 in the city of Venice. All the credit mostly goes to Roberto Nevilis for being one of the first to give homework. There might have been others, but there is no evidence or recordings of them.
According to Roberto Nevilis, who invented school and homework, this academic task provides the student with the opportunity:
to work without haste;
to study with no outside estimation;
to choose the optimal rhythm (hours) of work;
to independently plan the course of work;
to involve all necessary sources of information.
In fact homework was introduced during the same time as the formal school system. In that time only well-to-do people had leisure of education and Nevilis wanted that his pupils should fully understand and embrace the lessons they learnt. Since formal educational system was developed at the same time as homework it became a part of it in European countries.
In the United States educational was not taken seriously till the 20th century. It was taken as a nuisance since children were needed at home to support their family instead of being involved with studies. But after the 2nd World War the mindset of people changed when the World stated needing more people with educational qualification to help with problem around the Globe.
Have you ever wondered about how these alphabets came to be or what their secret story is? Well, hop in for a ride to know about some little known stories of the alphabets that allows you to communicate!
A: The capital A hasn’t always looked the way it does now. In ancient Semitic languages, the letter was upside down, which created a symbol that resembled a steer with horns.
B: Grab paper and pen and start writing down every number as a word. Do you notice one missing letter? If you kept going, you wouldn’t use a single letter b until you reached one billion.
C: Benjamin Franklin wanted to banish c from the alphabet—along with j, q, w, x and y—and replace them with six letters he’d invented himself. He claimed that he could simplify the English language.
D: Contrary to popular belief, the D in D-day does not stand for ‘doom’ or ‘death’—it stands for ‘day’. The US military marks important operations and invasions with a D as a placeholder. (So the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 was D-1.)
E: Meet the ‘Smith’ of the English alphabet—e is used more often than any other letter. It appears in 11 per cent of all words, according to an analysis of over 2,40,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
F: Anyone educated in today’s school system knows that the lowest grade you can get is an F. The low-water mark, however, used to be represented by the letter E. When Mount Holyoke College administrators redesigned the grading system in 1898, professors worried that students would think the grade meant ‘excellent’. F more obviously stands for ‘fail’.
G: Both g and c were originally represented by the Phoenician symbol gimel, which meant camel. It was the Romans who finally separated the two letters, letting c keep its shape and adding a bar for the letter g.
H: The Brits have long had an h hang-up, according to Michael Rosen, author of Alphabetical: How Every Le-tter Tells a Story. They pronounce h two ways: ‘aitch’ and ‘haitch’. Accents that dropped the h from words were once considered ‘lower class’, Rosen writes. And in Northern Ireland, pronunciation distinguished Catholics (‘haitch’) from Protestants (‘aitch’).
I: Funnily enough, the dot over the letters i and j has a funny-sounding name: It’s called a tittle.
J: This is one of the two letters that do not appear on the periodic table. (Q is the other.) Invented in the 1500s by an Italian, j was also one of the last letters to be added to the alphabet.
K: With the possible exception of l (see below), k is the most notorious letter in sports. It’s how baseball fans record a strikeout. (When the first box score was written back in 1859, s was used to indicate a sacrifice; k was plucked from the end of ‘struck’.)
L: The National Football League has traditionally used Roman numerals to denote the number of the Big Game, but for the 50th Super Bowl, they decided to go with just the number 50. Why? Sports fans use the letters w and l as shorthand for ‘win’ and ‘loss’. Because the Roman numeral for 50 is L, the NFL worried that Super Bowl L would be, in PR terms, a big loser.
M: You can’t say the letter m without your lips touching. Go ahead and try it!
N: The letter n was originally associated with water—the Phoenician word for n was ‘nun’, which later became the Aramaic word for ‘fish’. In fact, the capital N got its shape because it was a pictorial representation of a crashing wave.
O: Only four letters (a, e, l, o) are doubled at the beginning of a word (aardvark, eel, llama, ooze, etc.), and more words start with double o in English than with any other pair.
P: This may be the most versatile letter in English. It’s the only consonant that needs no help in forming a word sandwich with any vowel: pap, pep, pip, pop, pup.
Q: One out of every 510 letters in English words is a q, making it the least common letter in the English alphabet, according to a Concise Oxford English Dictionary analysis.
R: Sometimes referred to as the littera canina, or the ‘canine letter’, because Latin speakers trilling it sound like a growling dog, r gets a shout-out from William Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet’s nurse calls the letter “the dog’s name” in act 2, scene 4.
S: The English alphabet briefly included a letter called a ‘long s’. Used from the late Renaissance to the early 1800s, it resembled the letter f but was pronounced as an s. You’ll see it in various manuscripts written by the [American] Founding Fathers, including the Bill of Rights.
T: The term ‘T-shirt’ refers to the T shape of the garment’s body and sleeves. F. Scott Fitzgerald is believed to be the first to use the term in popular culture, in 1920, when the main character in his novel This Side of Paradise brings a T-shirt with him to boarding school.
U: Before the 1500s, u and v were used interchangeably as a vowel or a consonant. A French educational reformer helped change that in 1557 when he started using u exclusively as a vowel and v as the consonant.
V: This is the only letter in the English language that is never silent. Even usually conspicuous letters such as j and z are silent in words we have borrowed from foreign languages, such as marijuana (originally a Spanish word) and laissez-faire (French).
W: Ever wonder why we call it a double-u instead of double-v? The Latin alphabet did not have a letter to represent the w sound in Old English, so seventh-century scribes just wrote it as uu. The double-u symbol eventually meshed together to form the letter w.
X: From ‘X marks the spot’ to ‘solve for x’, this is the go-to letter to represent something unknown. The idea is believed to have come from mathematician René Descartes, who used the last three letters of the alphabet to represent unknown quantities in his book The Geometry. He chose a, b and c to stand for known quantities.
Y: The switch-hitter in the alphabet, y functions as both a vowel and a consonant. The Oxford English Dictionary actually calls it a semivowel because while the letter stops your breath in words such as yell and young—making it a consonant—it also creates an open vocal sound in words such as myth or hymn.
Z: Believe it or not, the letter z has not always been the last letter of the alphabet. For a time, the Greeks had zeta in a respectable place at number seven.
Funny Math Jokes for Kids
Funny Number Jokes for Kids
Funny Math Riddles for Kids
