Hint
Find anagrams of the words in this order: PLEASE, TRANCE, LISTEN, WARNED, VEINED, BRUISE.
Answer
ANSWER.
Reasoning
The initial letters are RWASEN, which is an anagram of ANSWER. bruise becomes rubieswarned becomes wander (or warden)please becomes asleeplisten becomes silentveined becomes envied (or endive)trance becomes nectar
The word DEBATE can also be made, but this requires an obscure anagram.
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Puzzle 202
During a recent BrainBashers thinking contest(!), the total number of points scored by the first six players was 103 and every score was above zero.
The first player scored half the points of the second player, who in turn scored 6 points fewer than the third player.
The third player in turn scored two thirds the points of the fourth player.
The fifth player managed to score the same number of points as the difference between the first and fourth player's points (larger − smaller).
Finally, the sixth player scored 14 fewer points than the fifth player.
Can you determine how many points the sixth player managed to score?
Hint
The fourth player is the key to this tricky question.
Answer
9 points.
Respectively the scores were 7, 14, 20, 30, 23, 9.
Reasoning
If we label the six players A, B, C, D, E, and F, we know that:
[1] A + B + C + D + E + F = 103
and from the clues:
A = B ÷ 2 B = C − 6 C = D x 2 ÷ 3 E = D − A F = E − 14
Note that it could be E = A − D or E = D − A, but using A − D we'd end up with a negative value for E later, which isn't allowed (so we'd have to try again with D − A anyway).
As we have no information for D, it's best to find all of the other letters in terms of D. These steps are left as an exercise (e.g. use C in the equation for B), but the result is:
A = ( D − 9) ÷ 3 B = (2D − 18) ÷ 3 C = (2D ) ÷ 3 D = (3D ) ÷ 3 E = (2D + 9) ÷ 3 F = (2D − 33) ÷ 3
Writing it as D = 3D ÷ 3 makes things slightly clearer in the next step.
