OK, here is the new puzzle…..
Erica has two children. One of them is male. What is the probability of her other child also being male?
Yesterday I posted this puzzle….
A camper walks one mile south from their tent. They then walk one mile west and has a little dance with a bear. Then they walk one mile north, and find themselves back at their camp.
What colour was the bear?
If you haven’t tried to solve it, have a go now. For everyone else, the answer is below, along with another puzzle….
The camper had a dance with a white bear because the directions only make sense if he was at the North Pole!
Follow the blog for more daily puzzles. See you tomorrow!
Predict that not everyone will like Richard’s answer tomorrow – whatever it is.
I predict…….
With global warming the north pole is rather wet. The camper CAN be close to the south pole, at a distance such that if he walks one mile south, the the circumference of the cirle he walks due west is exactly one mile. It’s true that for the moment there are no polar bears, but they will probably migrate…
Since the answer is obviously 50%, clearly it must be something else….
Oh, wait. There are four possibilities….
nou.. it was a brown dancing bear and they danced together a mile east before heading north. This also makes as much sense as dancing with a polar bear. So todays puzzle.. If i follow the words you wrote. You already said she has two children, one of them is male. So that makes the other one Female. But its probably something you can pull wherever you want.
@Mellthorn I think you’ve hit the nail on the head 🙂
Just word play (‘only’?) or probability?
To #6: perhaps two thirds of….. ? 🙂
“also” so 25%
I predict a lot of people will say the popular wrong answer 1/3.
Ahem… not to pick nits or anything but ” the directions only make sense if he was at the North Pole” is incorrect. There’s a countable infinite number of uncountable infinite sets of points where those directions also work, but there are no bears there, just penguins.
Um, actually… it’s very unlikely you’d find a Polar bear within several hundred miles of the North Pole, because of the lack of any food supply. Instead you will find them mostly around the Arctic Circle and a bit south of there. In fact, they would probably be better named Circumpolar bears.