Somebody shoot me…my lord, I guess this really was a brainteaser after all!
BTW What the hell can you buy in a bottle w/a cork for a 1.05 ?
(an empty bottle and cork I guess)
Good question. It would probably be good in Marilyn vos Savant’s column, though.
From a late Fifties or early Sixties Peanuts Cartoon:
Lucy (to something Linus said): “Your Ignorance is appaling.”
Linus: “Most ignorance is.”
Haven’t you ever heard of the free market? The fact that the bottle and cork are priced at $1.05 has only partial bearing on the price of a bottle, or the price of a cork. In fact, if I were to sell you a bottle, separately, I may have a wholesale problem; e.g. if I can only buy bottles and corks in combination, I would have a leftover cork – could be a storage problem, certainly an inventory problem.
So, if you want just a bottle, I might charge $1.07 (or $7.07, or whatever I want, because I don’t really want to sell just bottles). Which would make the price of a cork $0.07. 0r, if you want just a cork, I might have to charge $0.23, to cover my handling.
Then again, I may get the bottles and corks from different suppliers, in which case I am providing a premium – bottles combined with corks. I could charge the $1.05 for the combination, while bottles alone may go for $1.01 (thus corks for $0.01).
This problem relys upon a false reality, a reality of pure mathematics, without real people to mess things up. Further evidence of this false reality is the impossible amount in it’s purported solution: two and a half cents.
Real people would price the bottle at $1.09, and pocket the extra $0.04 cents. Maybe that’s why it’s in Ripleys…
Stick a cork in it!
I counldn’t resist. Good riddle though! It tricked me up the first time I read it.
We made Threadspotting - Believe It or Not!
Threadspotting?
Did anyone else ever read this analysis of an 1855 “flame war” over a math problem in a magazine which was considered a precursor to online message boards? (scroll down a page)
Heh, the more things change, the more they stay the same.