快猫短视频

#118 The spiky shield

Alice creates metal artwork, and her latest piece is a spiky shield, shown above. The shield is 2 metres across the spikes, and so Alice ordered a large box for shipping that was 2 metres square. However, the shield rotated in the box and could now rattle around freely, and Alice realised she needed a smaller square box into which the shield would fit as snugly as possible.

She went to order a new box from Box-U-Need, but discovered that its website annoyingly requires you to state dimensions in metres using whole number ratios. So if she wanted to order a box that was 1.5 metres wide, she would have to put in 3/2 metres (or 15/10 metres, if she felt so inclined). Worse still, the website only allows you to use numbers smaller than 20 on the top and bottom of the fraction, so a fraction such as 25/18 would be rejected.

What is the smallest Box-U-Need box into which the artwork will fit?

Solution next week

Our crosswords are now solvable online

#117 My fair ladybird

Solution

You can win in four guesses (at most) if you guess B, C, C, B (or C, B, B, C). If the bean isn鈥檛 there when you first guess B, it will be under either B, C, or D next round. If your second guess of C turns up empty, then it will either be under A or C next round. If your third guess of C still doesn鈥檛 work out, the only place the bean can be on the fourth round is under cup B.