Bob has half as many pies as Alex

Post Reply New Topic

You didn't, soloha brought up Ferrets first

True, but I was happy to oblige by responding lol .

absolved of all guilt then

my brain can't comprehend there being a 1/3 of 100, 33.3 - 66.6 - 99.9 recurring to infinity but it will never truly reach 100 exactly, but in a pie you would not have each piece of exact equal value, more like 33 - 33 - 34. But if i think in terms of a circle, it's measured up to 360 degrees and obviously a 1/3 of 360 is 120 without any decimal places to worry about.

Reminds me of the story of the two guys from West Virginia.

They got hired together as temporary construction help to dig a ditch.

When they completed the ditch they reported to their foreman. And the foreman paid them. The trouble is that foreman had to use up his last chick. So he paid the two of them with one check for both of them. And, the amount of that one check was exactly 1.69.

This put the two of them in a dilemma because they couldnt figure out how to divide up a dollar and sixty nine cents evenly two ways.

So one of them got an idea. He said "lets go to the nearest store. Find something that is exactly 1.69, and buy it with our check, and then we can split that thing up evenly! The other guy agreed that it was a great idea.

So they popped into the nearest convenience store. Browsed up and down the aisles. But alas the only thing that they could find that was exactly a dollar sixty nine was a box of tampax tampons. So they went to the cash register, signed over their check and bought it.

Then they went home to their trailer in the trailer park, open up the box, and dumped the contents out on the table.

"This one is for you, this one is for me,...."

And then finnally the two guys had it. Two exactly equal piles of tampons!

But one of them pleaded "well...now that we have 'em what can we DO with them?"

The second guy look at the first guy like he was out of mind, and "WHADYAA MEAN 'what can we do with them'!?"

"There are PLENTY of things that we can do with them!"

The first guy goes..." uhhh...like what?"

The second guy replied "like it says right here on the box....you can play tennis with them, you can play volleyball with them, you can ski with them,...."

^lol good one



i would have said that the pies must be different sizes.

this must be why word problems confuse me.

I was tricked, but not at all flummoxed by the question. Fell into the integer trap.

I woulda said "ninety nine is practically the same as a hundred, so half as many ...just call it 'fifty'".

Which would be a good answer if it were children, or ferrets, or automobiles. Things that hafta be counted as whole integers.

But I did forget that individual pies can be divided into fractions. So pies can be treated as real numbers, and not just as whole integers. So yeah, 49.5 would be the answer.

ah.
when i read "pies" i immediately think that they must be whole pies to count as a pie.
it makes sense that they could still be considered pies in fractions.
a piece of pie is still a pie. even if it is the smallest crumb of pie? it is a pie.

I've been told that I digress, but I usually digress in a more focused way. I wouldn't say that I have a short attention span (things usually hold my attention for awhile, unless they're exceptionally dull to me) heck, sometimes I focus on things too much. I know in English someone once asked me if everyone was dead in my brain, since I would focus on my work so much and tended to shut everyone else out when I was writing. Hell, my parents had me tested to see if I was deaf because I had a tendency to have selective hearing. In my school records it says I had a short attention span in lesson, and would often return to my art projects to alter them when I wasn't supposed to. I guess I was something of a perfectionist even back then, haha.

What usually happens is someone asks me to explain something, and I give them too much information on it and they get bored and stop listening. Apparently I use too many words. Other times I'll end up expanding into related things when I shouldn't, for instance one time I came out to someone and I ended up discussing nature VS nurture and my opinions on that in the coming out post when a simple "I'm gay" probably would've sufficed. Dammit me. XD

Well... no.

"Half of a pie" is just half of a pie. But its still a viable desert.
In theory a baker could sell you half of a pie (or one 12th slice of pie) for less than the price of a whole pie.

In contrast if you chop a car in two neither half would be drivable. So a car dealership couldn't sell you a "half car" (even if you couldn't afford a whole car).

That was exactly what my problem was. I'm not alone. Thank you. This topic has turned out to be pretty interesting because of the different ways in which people perceived the problem. My initial thinking was that people would either get it right or if they had a problem with it, it would be the same problem I had. Theory of Mind for you

Last edited by soloha on 09 Aug 2017, 2:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yeah...I guess there is more than one way that you could...slice it!

You've inspired me. I have a new question. If Bob has 99 pies, and Alex has half of Bob's pies, how many deserts does Alex have?

Why does Bob have so many pies anyway? Does he have some kind of pie business going on?

Last edited by Lost_dragon on 09 Aug 2017, 2:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

oh no, you've brought the real world back.
now i'm confused again.

but still a crumb of pie is still a viable dessert, albeit unsatisfying.
if alex has 100.1 pies and bob has half as many, wouldn't bob have 50.05 pies?