There are two tricks to this one. The first is 1 × 0. But it’s mostly there as a distraction. Yes, 1 × 0 is 0, but that doesn’t affect anything else in the equation. The second, far trickier element is that the lines ending with 1 don’t have a + sign next to them. That means they should be combined with the following line.
A snail. They carry their homes on their back, and a house would crush a person (even the tiny houses). And the trail of silver is a bit of a stretch, but it’s the slimy, gooey substance snails leave behind them.
On a remote (imaginary) island, there are 11 snakes and a single mouse. As you’d expect, snakes eat the mice. But contrary to what you’d expect, when a snake eats a mouse, it turns into one.
The snakes live by only two rules:
1. Don’t get eaten. 2. Eat mice as long as rule #1 isn’t violated.
How many snakes and mice will there be left on the island?
Sequoia, eulogia or miaoued are all good options, but there’s an even shorter (and more obscure) word with all the vowels and not a single consonant: Iouea. It’s not the kind of word you’d use at the dinner table, but it’s listed in the Wikipedia dictionary as a genus of Cretaceous fossil sponges.
If you got really tricky and tried to find a word that contained the letters in the phrase ‘all of the vowels’, you probably found, like I did, that there isn’t one. But it was still worth checking.