What Has 4 Legs and is Always Ready to Travel

Information technology’s summer, and when it comes to Hollywood, summertime means large blockbuster action movies. One of my favorites is the Bruce Willis / Samuel L. Jackson modern archetype
Die Difficult With a Vengeance.

For those who are unfamiliar with the moving-picture show — shame on you! — information technology’s the tertiary installment of the
Die Hard
franchise, featuring catchphrase-spouting New York Metropolis cop John McClane battling terrorists, criminals, and all sorts of unsavory characters.

In
Die Hard With a Vengeance, a bomber named Simon is terrorizing the city and McClane is 1 of his playthings, forced to play Simon Says and achieve increasingly hard tasks that Simon sets before him. Equally McClane (and electrician Zeus Carver, who saves McClane from the start of Simon’s games) race around the city trying to prevent other bombs from going off, Simon enacts an elaborate scheme to rob the urban center.

Thankfully, McClane and Zeus have a knack for brain teasers and riddles, because several of Simon’southward devious tasks require quick thinking and sharp puzzle skills.

[I of the terminal movies to feature payphones as a fundamental plot betoken…]

First, Simon hits them with a math trouble:

As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks, every sack had seven cats, every true cat had seven kittens. Kittens, cats, sacks, wives. How many were going to St. Ives?

As McClane fervently tries to practice multiplication in his head, Zeus realizes this isn’t a give-and-take problem, information technology’s a riddle. The man was going to St. Ives when he met this man, significant the man was coming from St. Ives. And then the wives, sacks, cats, and kittens are irrelevant. Merely the narrator is going to St. Ives, and then the answer to the riddle is i.

[Seems like a nice place to accept your many wives…]

In their second puzzly task, Simon offers the following question:

“What has four legs and always ready to travel?”

McClane doesn’t go it, but Zeus immediately identifies it as an elephant joke for kids (although he doesn’t actually deliver the punchline: an elephant, because information technology has four legs and a torso).

They quickly spot a nearby fountain with an elephant statue. Awaiting them is a suitcase bomb and two empty jugs. When McClane opens the suitcase, he accidentally arms the flop, and Simon calls to inform them that the simply style to disarm the bomb is to make full one of the jugs with exactly four gallons of water and place it on the scale in the suitcase.

[And they say what we learn in school has no practical, existent-world applications…]

The problem is the two jugs hold iii gallons and v gallons, respectively. Simon has ready them up with some other encephalon teaser, but i with a dire time limit to solve.

Thankfully, there are 2 ways to solve this encephalon teaser.

Method #1

• Fill the 3-gallon jug and cascade the water into the 5-gallon jug.
• Refill the iii-gallon jug and cascade the water into the 5-gallon jug until the five-gallon jug is full, leaving 1 gallon in the three-gallon jug.
• Empty the five-gallon jug and cascade the 1 gallon of h2o from the 3-gallon jug into the 5-gallon jug.
• Fill the 3-gallon jug again and empty it into the 5-gallon jug, leaving exactly 4 gallons in the 5-gallon jug.

Method #two

• Make full the 5-gallon jug and pour that water into the 3-gallon jug until the 3-gallon jug is full, leaving 2 gallons in the 5-gallon jug.
• Empty the 3-gallon jug and cascade the 2 gallons of water from 5-gallon jug into the 3-gallon jug.
• Refill the 5-gallon jug and pour that water into the 3-gallon jug until the 3-gallon jug is full, leaving four gallons in the five-gallon jug.

Either manner, y’all’ve disarmed the bomb. Good job!

[While Simon has McClane and Zeus run
all over the city, he has one specific goal…]

The last riddle Simon gives Zeus and McClane is another brain teaser masquerading equally a math trouble:

“What is 21 out of 42?”

At the time of the motion picture’southward release, in that location had been 42 presidents, so 21 out of 42 was President Chester A. Arthur, and Chester A. Arthur Elementary School was where Simon had hidden one of his bombs (a fake one, equally information technology turns out) equally a distraction.

In the end, McClane and Zeus outwit the cunning Simon, and once once again, puzzle-solving skills salvage the solar day! Hooray!

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