You invite two gardeners for a price estimation on picking up all the autumn leaves in your yard. You neighbor, seeing you with them outside, smiles and trying to be polite but still helpful, tells that one of these gardeners is a liar and another is truthful. Hearing this, one gardener says, "I am a truthful one, he is a liar." The second gardener replies, "Yes, he is telling the truth about being truthful, but I am not a liar." Which one is which and why? (this puzzle is adopted from The Super Smart Super Puzzle Book #2 by A. Salny)
Submit your answer on our Family Puzzle Marathon site. Solve three puzzles and get a prize!
See TheMathMom presentation:
Popular Puzzles
-
This is an easy puzzle that you all are welcome to share with your kids and friends: Put addition signs between the digits 88888888 to get ...
-
This puzzle arrived via email from one of the fans. Can you move just one match to make this statement correct? There is more than one sol... -
Here is a number magic trick that came to me via mail. All of you, math detectives, are invited to unveil its magic with your logic. Tak... -
This came in a magic trick box that our daughter picked for her birthday. Exhausted from all the Bar Mitzvah preparations for her older b... -
This came from my son who got it from someone else at school. I solved it quickly and texted him the answer just as I was getting into ... -
Magic squares are tables of numbers where sums of every row, every column and both diagonals produce the same number. No, they were not in... -
My daughter's school teacher is showing kids some number mysticism. She told them to take any 3 digit number, e.g.793. Scramble its digi... -
We are done with the winter Olympics and now are looking forward to the Oscar's entertainment. As we saw in the previous puzzle , t... -
I found this puzzle in a tiny but mighty pocket puzzle book named Optical Illusions. Suppose the yellow billiard ball strikes the bumper a... -
You have 42 parrots and 7 cages of various sizes. Lock all the parrots inside the cages so that no cage is empty and each cage contains an ...
4 comments:
I've got two approaches:
(A) The first gardener is telling the truth, and the second gardener is half-true, half a lie (so his sentence in its entirety is a lie). (If the second gardener were telling the truth, then the his statement that the first gardener was telling the truth would be a lie, so it's self-contradictory)
(B) When the first gardener says "he" he means the neighbor, not the other gardener. Both gardeners are telling the truth.
I like solution (B) better.
Two solutions! I like it. You can choose which one you prefer depending on whom you trust more - your neighbors or your gardeners.
Another point for Kim.
Expect a new puzzle tomorrow.
:-) But what was the answer you were expecting? I like the idea of the neighbor being the liar. It's the out of the box solution.
The solution I was expecting is the first one. Second gardener is lying as he is telling that both gardeners are truthful. But the second one is a very interesting alternative. Love it!
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.