Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Does it Come in a Box?

A certain bottle of wine costs $10. If the wine inside the bottle is worth $9 more than the bottle, what is the value of the bottle?

8 comments:

  1. The value of the bottle is $0.5 and the value of the wine is $9.5

    Any other possible answer?

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  2. 50cent! Michael beat me to it, though.

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  3. Tough one! 50 cents by some comments. I don't know. What is the answer?? This blog would have been excellent if the author would post the answers.

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  4. Curious,

    I like to leave the problems without providing solutions so that readers have a chance to work on the problems without being tempted with an easy solution right away.

    Fifty cents is indeed the correct answer. Using some simple algebra shows us why:

    The value of the bottle = B.

    The value of the wine (W) = B+9.

    The total value of the bottle (B) plus the wine (W) is: B+W = 10.

    W is equal to B+9 so if we substitute 'W' with 'B+9' we find that the total value is: B+B+9 = 10.

    We can now subtract 9 from both sides of the equation: B+B = 1

    or

    2*B = 1.

    Since we only have one bottle (B), not two (2*B) we divide both sides of the equation by 2 and see that the value of the bottle (B) is 0.5.

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  5. the value of the bottle could be any number from 1 to 99 cents. Easy

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  6. The Bottle costs $1. Because if the bottle costs $1 and the wine costs $9 more than the bottle then that brings the total up to $10 which is what it costs in the 1st place

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