English - The Real Deal

一道挺有意思的题目：

You are given two ropes and a lighter. This is the only equipment you can use. You are told that each of the two ropes has the following property: if you light one end of the rope, it will take exactly one hour to burn all the way to the other end. But it doesn’t have to burn at a uniform rate. In other words, half the rope may burn in the first five minutes, and then the other half would take 55 minutes. The rate at which the two ropes burn is not necessarily the same, so the second rope will also take an hour to burn from one end to the other, but may do it at some varying rate, which is not necessarily the same as the one for the first rope. Now you are asked to measure a period of 45 minutes. How will you do it?

说实话，我没琢磨出来。今天终于看到了答案（<---不想知道的请勿点击，并请跳过下一段落），忍不住发出“怎么我就没想到？”的感慨。

Light both ends of rope A and one end of rope B. After 30 minutes, rope A will be completely burned up and there will be 30 minutes of rope B left. Light the other end of rope B; it will burn up in 15 minutes. Total time elapsed since starting the ropes on fire: 45 minutes.

有精力的朋友可以尝试更多的题目，答案都可以在更新里找到。脑子转不过来不要紧，大不了当阅读训练。

今天还看到一个小知识，顺便分享一下：

前几天看电视，说“肺”字有很多人写错了，把右边的“巿”写成“市”，电视台还专门做了调查。其实，常用汉字里还有个比肺字更容易写错的字，就是“冒”。许多人写冒字的时候会把上半部写成“曰”，没有注意到下面的两横与边上的两竖是不相连的。

查了下字典，还真是不相连的，以后一定注意。知错能改，善莫大焉！

Bonus video: Alanis Morissette - Walk Away (Hey, how you doin’?)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Miscellany, Interesting Find. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.