This mother comes from a family of eight,
Supports her children in spite of their weight,
Turns around without being called,
Has held you since the time you crawled.
“Mother” Earth. The family of eight are the eight planets, all of the world’s population is quite a load, the earth is always spinning (or turning around) and unless you’re an alien, you’ve been on earth your whole life.
The first four letters are a variation of the weather.
The third through seventh letters give support but also could used when someone is executed.
And the last three letters forms the name of a person.
They all fall in the middle.
15 February was the middle of February (1984 being a leap year).
2 July was the middle day of the year 1983.
And 16 December was the middle of December.
A potato. The roots growing out of a potato are called eyes, when you cut a potato in half it doesn’t produce any moisture and if you leave a poor potato to its own devices, it will die.
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.