Counter

website counter

Monday, August 11, 2008

Monday's Brain Burner......

The Carpenter and the Nails

A 31" x 31" square metal plate needs to be fixed by a carpenter on to a wooden board. The carpenter uses nails all along the edges of the square such that there are 32 nails on each side of the square. Each nail is at the same distance from the neighboring nails. How many nails does the carpenter use?
share on: facebook

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

124? 30 on each side and 1 in each corner. or none, why would a carpenter fix a metal plate?

Bobbo said...

I agree on both accounts

Jim (Jimbo) (Jing) said...

Answer....The four corners of the square have one nail each.

Each side of the square now requires 30 nails (excluding the four corners).

Thus, total number of nails used = 4 + (4 x 30) = 124.