Mental Exercise

Ultimate poem. One day it occurred to me that it would make an interesting exercise to figure out the longest sentence, the sentence with the most words, in which all the words of the sentence rhyme. The best that I could come up with was a sentence of five words. If anyone can do better, it will be printed in a future issue of The Think Club.

Odd Pair There are two different words, one of the words has twice the number of letters as the other. Even though you could not say there is any difference in the meaning of the two words, they can not be used interchangeably (the rules of English dictate that one can not be substituted for the other). What could these two words possibly be? Hint: both words are used many times in this issue of The Think Club.

Pre Fix Many words can form a new word by placing a prefix in front of them, for example 'flame' becomes 'inflame' by placing 'in' in front of it. Consider the following list of words.  promise
plain
pose
The same prefix can be placed in front of each word to make a new word. What is the prefix that can do this?

Magic Grid Consider the following list of numbers:

-4, -3, -2, -1, 0, -1, -2, -3, -4.

Can you place each of these in the following 3 x 3 grid so that every row, column, and the two main diagonals total to zero?

End Time What is the end of space, the end of time, and the beginning of eternity?

Three Coins Three coins of the same size can be arranged such that each coin touches the others as illustrated below:

Now suppose you have four coins. How can four coins be arranged so that every coin touches the other three?

Answer

Answers Ultimate Poem The five word sentence is "Who do you coo to?"

Odd Pair The words are 'a' and 'an'. Pre Fix The prefix is 'com' which can be used to form the words 'compromise,' 'complain,' and 'compose.'

Magic Grid Place the numbers in the grid as shown below (words instead of numbers are used so you don't accidentally see the answer. Other variation of this answer are possible):

End Time It is the letter 'e.'

Three Coins The trick to the solution is to think outside of two dimensions. If you think in three dimensions you will quickly see that you can place on coin flat on a horizontal surface and the other three forming a three sided pyramid.