He was born on February 29th in a leap year. Consequently, in his 87 years, he only witnessed twenty-one of his actual birthdays. The other years there was no February 29th.
Last winter I found myself locked out of my house because I couldn’t remember the 5-digit code to open the garage door. I used the following facts to get inside.
1. The second and third digits add up to 9. 2. The first digit is equal to the second digit cubed. 3. The sum of the third and fifth digits is the smallest number with exactly five divisors. 4. The fourth digit is equal to 6 times the second-to-last digit. 5. None of the digits repeat.
If we label each digit a, b, c, d and e, we get the following equations. 1. b + c = 9 2. a = b3 3. c + e = 16 (since 16 is the smallest number with five divisors – 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16). 4. d = 6 * d (The fourth and second-to-last digits are the same number, meaning d must be zero to satisfy the equation) 5. b must be zero, one or two (b can’t be three because that makes a=27, which isn’t a single digit). Zero and one result in duplicate digits (00907 and 11808 respectively) so the only remaining value for b is 2, giving us 82709 and warmth.
One letter can be used to replace the first letter of each word pair below to create two new English words. The new letters can then be combined to spell a word. What is that word?
MAIL ____ PINK CART ____ SAID GRID ____ RIMLESS LINK ____ BOUND ROWED ____ RIPPLE
My first is twice in apple but not once in tart. My second is in liver but not in heart. My third is in giant and also in ghost. Whole I’m best, when I am roast. What am I?
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.