A market vendor sells dried cooking herbs in whole-number amounts from 1 to 40 grams. The vendor has an old-fashioned two pan weigh scale, and has exactly four weights of different amounts that allows them to weigh out any of these amounts of herbs -- without using the herbs or any other object as an auxiliary weight. 1. What are the values of the four weights? - Since the lightest weight is 1 gram, one of the four weights must be 1 gram. - Now, we have the following weights to measure herbs that weigh from 1 to 40 grams: 1, a, b, and c, where a < b < c . - I couldn’t see the pattern right away, but I was sure that there must be a pattern for this problem. - I did lots of trial-and-error methods and figured out that the four weights have to be 1, 3, 9, and 27. - ...
Comments
Post a Comment