Thursday, April 1, 2010

White House Easter Egg Roll


Hundreds of lucky kids arrive every year to the White House Easter Egg Roll. Last year, a specially created commission decided to mark every egg with a number in order to keep track of them all. To avoid using ink, single digit stickers were purchased by this committee. All the eggs were marked with a unique number, using one or more stickers, numbers were assigned in an ascending order. For example, three stickers with digits 2, 4 and 5 were used to make 245. The White House Press Secretary was not at liberty to reveal how many eggs in total were used. Do you think the press can figure it out given that the total number of stickers purchased was 2893?

Submit your answer on our Family Puzzle Marathon Be first to solve three puzzles and get a prize!

4 comments:

Katrina said...

Assuming that they began numbering at 1 and went consectively from there; there were 1000 eggs used.

Numbers 0-9 used 9 stickers
Numbers 10 - 99 used 180 stickers (90 * 2)
Numbers 100 - 999 used 2700 stickers (900 * 3)
and 1000 used 4 stickers.

9+180+2700+4 = 2893

Maria said...

Wow! A new puzzle solver and a good one!
Katrina gets her first puzzle point.
Three new puzzles next Friday: on the website, in the newsletter, on Facebook and Twitter.

Anonymous said...

Duh, forgot #1000 uses 4 digits, dumb. Tom

Jerome said...

If you start at 0 then from 0 to 9 is 10 stickers not 9. I found that this puzzle didn't quite get to 1000. You needed 2894 and then you would be fine if you start at 0. If you start at 1 all is well.

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