This word starts with the same letter it ends with and there are two of the same along the way. There is another pair and one each of two more, just to make you smile. What is the word?
Giggling. It starts and ends with ‘g’ and there are two more ‘g’s in the middle. It also has a pair of ‘i’s and one ‘l’ and ‘n’. Plus, giggling makes you smile ;)
If a piece of rope was tightly wrapped around the earth and you added 3 feet to its length, how high could you uniformly raise it from the earth’s surface?
What is the longest unscientific English word that uses every letter in the word exactly twice? For example, noon has two Ns and two Os, but it’s not nearly long enough.
Happenchance. There are two Hs, two As, and so on for all the letters in the word. The longest scientific word with the same property is probably esophagographers.
In a game of cards, GEORGE partnered with MARY, while TED had to choose a partner. He could have chosen ANN, EDNA, JOAN or ANGELA. Whom did he choose and why?
I’m a five letter word. Remove my last two letters and I’m a synonym of drag. My second and third letters form an exclamation and my first and second letters are a homophone with a number. What am I?
Towel. Tow is a synonym of drag, ow is an exclamation when you’re hurt (and far more appropriate in mixed company than the four-letter alternatives) and to is a homophone of two.
A princess is as old as the prince will be when the princess is twice the age that the prince was when the princess’s age was half the sum of their present ages.
This one took a while to figure out and there are numerous valid ways of finding the answer.
Here is the solution I came up with
I created the following table from the riddle:
Current
Future
Past
Princess
x
2z
(x+y)/2
Prince
y
x
z
I then created three equations, since the difference in their age will always be the same.
d = the difference in ages
x – y = d
2z – x = d
x/2 + y/2 – z = d
I then created a matrix and solved it using row reduction.
x
y
z
1
-1
0
d
-1
0
2
d
.5
.5
-1
d
It reduced to:
x
y
z
1
0
0
4d
0
1
0
3d
0
0
1
5d/2
This means that you can pick any difference you want (an even one presumably because you want integer ages).
Princess age: 4d
Prince age: 3d
Ages that work
Princess
Prince
4
3
8
6
16
12
24
18
32
24
40
30
48
36
56
42
64
48
72
54
80
60
To see other solutions check out the comments from when I posted this on my blog.