Oh I give up! Some people just have no sense of logic. You lot are bloody useless! :D

Dont insult us. just because you didnt phrase the question clearly enough, doesnt meant we are 'bloody useless'. maths problems most commonly include a specified set of information. normaly you have no need to 'decode' clues like the violin, and the house number if it is a maths problem. had it been a riddle then you would have had to, which is why that is how it was largely interprited.

Dont insult us. just because you didnt phrase the question clearly enough, doesnt meant we are 'bloody useless'. maths problems most commonly include a specified set of information. normaly you have no need to 'decode' clues like the violin, and the house number if it is a maths problem. had it been a riddle then you would have had to, which is why that is how it was largely interprited. </font>[/QUOTE]As I said before, only the people who got it wrong are complaining and nitpicking. Who cares anyway, some people have already managed to ruin a thread meant for fun/entertainment and degenerate it into a pathetic argument, might as well forget this thread now.

He wrote it perfectly well. Not all 'word problems' in math are esily reduced to x+y=z. And this isn't a logic problem, but a deductive reasoning. It is solved in three steps. First determining all permutations of three numbers whose product is 36 (assumption: all numbers are integers - not a bad one either as it really simplifies things). Then, we know that the sum of those three numbers is equal to some unknown number, but the result of at least two permutations is ambiguous. The final clue has nothing to do with a violin, but that there is a single older child.

Don't get too frustrated though Vask, good deductive reasoning skills are as rare as common sense ... [img]tongue.gif[/img]

a child prodigy? who says the kid has to be talented? :D :D