Before any changes I’m a garlic or spice. My first is altered and I’m a hand-warming device. My second is changed and I’m trees in full bloom. The next letter change makes a deathly old tomb. Change the fourth to make a fruit of the vine. Change the last for a chart plotted with lines. What was I? What did I become? What did I turn out to be?
“Scram, you can’t catch me!” yelled the thief. While running to escape, his shirt skewered a box of nails. He ripped free, but skidded to a stop as he passed a policeman. He tried to run again, then cowered in fright. Crime doesn’t pay.
Noon and midnight are both 12 o’clock and the Twelve Days of Christmas is a popular Christmas carol.
There are twelve face cards in a standard 52-card deck and twelve is the largest number with one syllable.
There are twelve steps in Alcoholics Anonymous, a troy pound is 12 ounces, there were 12 tribes of Israel and a popular movie was called, “Twelve Angry Men” (12 members of the jury). There are twelve function keys on your keyboard. F1 often shows a help screen and F5 reloads pages in your browser.
Many recipes measure items by the dozen, adding one more for a baker’s dozen. There are twelve months in a year.
It’s surprising how many times the number twelve shows up in our culture.
Fred brings home 100 pounds of potatoes, which (being purely mathematical potatoes) consist of 99 percent water. He then leaves them outside overnight so that they consist of 98 percent water. What is their new weight?
100 lb of potatoes with 99% water weight means there’s 99 lb of water and 1 lb of solids, a 1:99 ratio.
If the water decreases to 98%, then the solids account for 2% of the weight. The 2:98 ratio reduces to 1:49. Since the solids still weigh 1 lb, the water must weigh 49 lb for a total of 50 lbs for the answer.
I make memories that last a lifetime, Without me you’ll be miserable, If you miss me you can gourge and it’s okay. Some say I am naturally split in two.
Sleep. It’s the time your mind organizes memories and knowledge. Sleep deprivation is miserable (as you well know if you’ve experienced it). If you miss a few nights of sleep, you can sleep more to catch up with no problems. And some believe that segmented sleep, where you sleep, wake for an hour, then go back to sleep, was the dominant form of sleep before the Industrial Revolution.