As a result of temporary magical powers, you have made it to the Wimbledon finals and are playing Roger Federer for all the marbles. However, your powers cannot last the whole match. What score do you want it to be when they disappear, to maximize your chances of hanging on for a win?
It sounds obvious that you should ask to be ahead two sets to love (it takes 3 out of 5 sets to win the men’s), and in the third set, ahead 5-0 in games and 40-love in the sixth game. (Probably you want to be serving, but if your serve is like mine, you might prefer Roger to be serving the sixth game down 0-40 so that you can pray for a double fault.)
Not so fast! These solutions give you essentially 3 chances to get lucky and win, but you can get six chances—with three services by you and three by Roger. You still want to be up two sets to none, but let the game score be 6-6 in the third set and 6-0—in your favor, of course—in the tiebreaker.
Sports. A descending nudge is a touchdown (nudge = touch, descending = down), a marvelous jibe is a grand slam, an abode on excursion is a home run and a bashing immersion is a slam dunk. All of these phrases are found in sports, more specifically American football, baseball and basketball.
There are many English words that you can add an “s” to make it plural. But far fewer words become singular when you add an “s”. What are two examples of these much rarer words?
A bag contains 64 balls of eight different colors. There are eight of each color (including red). What is the smallest number you would have to pick, without looking, to be sure of selecting 3 red balls?