Children who are turned off by mathematics often say they don’t enjoy it, they aren’t good at it and they see little point in it. Such an attitude towards the subject could be a formula for success. The nations with the best scores have the least happy, least confident mathematics students, says a study by the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. Countries reporting higher levels of enjoyment and confidence among mathematics students don’t do as well in the subject, the study suggests. In essence, happiness is overrated, says study author Tom Loveless. “We might want to focus on the math that kids are learning and just be a little less obsessed with the fact that they have to enjoy every minute of it,” said Loveless, who directs the Brown Center.

Puzzle 1:There are 5 girls in a long row in a mathematics class. Each girl has a favourite chocolate bar, colour, pet, hobby, and would like to go on a certain holiday. All the girls like different things. Your task is to solve the following clues — “who owns the crocodile”

Jo likes the wispa bite
The person with the hamster likes swimming
Hannah eats dairy milk
Jessica is on the left of Georgina
Lucy is the first on the left
The first person on the right likes swimming
The person who eats Milky Bars owns a horse
The person in the middle eats Dairy Milk
Jessica likes green
The person on the left of the middle wants to go to Tobago
The person who wants to go to the Maldives likes lilac
The person who likes Wispa Bites sits next to the person who wants to go to Florida
The person who likes pink wants to go to Florida
The person who sits first on the left likes lilac
The girl that likes blue owns a puppy
The person who likes skiing sits next to the person who has a hamster
The girl on the right of the girl who likes tennis likes horse riding
The girl next to the girl who likes Milky bar likes Boost
The girl who likes purple wants to got to Canada
The girl who likes Crunchies owns a rabbit
The girl who likes skiing sits next to the girl who plays ten-pin bowling
Jessica wants to go to Australia

Solutions on November 13

CORRECT ENTRIES

october 16

Raj Kumar Srivastava New Alipore , Calcutta - 54, K Sengupta, Calcutta - 19, Sayan Chatterjee, Howrah; Dipesh Kumar Kalyani, NIT Durgapur; Sunil Kumar Ojha; Jamshedpur; Koel Banerjee, Assam

Please send your entries to knowhow@abpmail.com, within 10 days. For snail mail the address is 6, Prafulla Sarkar Street, Calcutta -1. Don’t forget to mention the date of the puzzle.

PUZZLE CRACKED

The response this week (October 16) was not all that encouraging. Was the puzzle too difficult to crack? However, it was a real pleasure to read some of your solutions. It’s really heartening to see some of you brainstormers exercising your grey cells to come up with the correct solutions. Please keep your ideas and opinions coming. Here is the correct solution sent in by Sayan Chatterjee.

Solution: Four residents of Numeria (whose names had been abbreviated in the puzzle) played a game of Number War. The abbreviated names of the players along with their scores are provided below:

A = 65

B = 51

C= 17

D = 47