#159 Express coffee
The streets of New Addleton are set out in a rectangular grid. Seven coffee vendors (the circles in the diagram above) have stalls at metro stations and want to set up a central depot to collect supplies from each morning. They want to minimise their combined cycling distance from stall to depot. Pat has four candidates for the depot location: A, B, C and D.
鈥淎re you sure one of those four is optimal?鈥� asks Shahin. 鈥淚 suppose we could work out the total vendor-depot distance for every point on the grid.鈥�
鈥淣o need, I can tell you the best place just by looking at the diagram,鈥� announces Kim.
Which location does Kim recommend and why is she so confident?
#158 League of nations
Solution
England vs Scotland and Wales vs Ireland were the last two matches.
First up were Ireland vs England and France vs Wales. So Scotland played every round after that. Wales were at home for the third set of matches. And since home/away alternated, Wales missed round two, meaning Ireland and France were away that round. So Scotland and England must have been at home, and Scotland played Ireland and England faced France. Following through, we get:
Round 3: W vs E and F vs S
Round 4: I vs F and S vs W
Round 5: E vs S and W vs I
These were the actual 1975 Five Nations rugby contest fixtures.
Quick quiz #143
1 Males of which group of animals experience 鈥渕usth鈥�?
2 Which chemical element has the atomic number 33?
3 Where in the solar system are the volcanoes Olympus Mons and Ascraeus Mons?
4 Which mass extinction came first: the Permian-Triassic, the Devonian or the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction?
5 In the human spine, how many vertebrae are typically found in the sacrum?
Answers
1 Elephants
2 Arsenic
3 Mars
4 The Devonian extinction
5 Five
Solution next week