You should never ever be ashamed of looking pompous. I repeat NEVER. There is never any shame of virtue nor success. Unless of course if you are forced under collectivism, where extremism is measured by achievement. Think of these words my dear Bradley. Equality (equal outcomes everyone wins a prize) and equal outcomes., where the bright are dumbed down to the 50%. There are many schools for the under achievers but name one school, for the over achievers. May i direct you to a couple of books by amazing authors. "The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and The Mosr Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose. Kudos Bradley, I wish you the very best.
Quite the opposite, you looked incredibly humble imo. I’m abysmal at the conundrums- something in my brain just doesn’t turn a load of letters in a word without a clue and to get them in mere seconds deserves applause!
I just looked that up in my Merriam-Webster’s and it’s there! Defined as a stony meteorite. If it’s in the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary it has to be in the OED as well.
In that first letters round, there are two seven-letter chemical elements: RHODIUM and RHENIUM. And continuing the scientific theme, Susie missed a nine-letter word in the following round: AEROLITES. It's a type of stony meteorite. I've noticed that Susie often misses the technical scientific terms and it appears she's far more comfortable with humanities subjects. For the first numbers puzzle, I had this alternative solution: 75 + 1 = 76 10 + 3 - 2 = 11 76 x 11 = 836 836 + 6 = 842 And I beat Rachel in a numbers round! It _is_ very tricky. I wouldn't have spotted it except that I was looking at ways to get to 975 (that and playing 4 large numbers puzzles incessantly against the computer). What you need to do is go 5 times 1000 with 50 x 100. That's the starting point. 100 x 50 = 5000 5000 - 75 - 5 = 4920 4920 / 5 = 984 984 - 25 = 959 That may well be the only possible solution, so it's no discredit to Rachel that she missed it. In the following letters round, FLOTSAM was also there as a slightly more common 7. But aren't you lucky that the compilers of the _Oxford English Dictionary_ put _sfumato_ in just so that you could win one round of _Countdown_ ? (As you can see, I've read your blog post.) As for the third numbers round, that definitely _is_ more straightforward. Of course, the obvious solution is 75 x 8 + 7 + 1, but the 4 and the 8 on the board means the target could be factored by both numbers. (And once again, I thought there was an obvious answer and the contestants didn't use it.) 10 + 1 = 11 11 x 7 = 77 77 + 75 = 152 152 x 4 = 608 And factoring by 8 gives the easiest solution of all: 75 + 1 = 76 76 x 8 = 608 And you're just one away from something divisible by 7: 75 + 8 + 4 = 87 87 x 7 = 609 609 - 1 = 608 And in the final numbers round, I beat Rachel to the answer again. This is a puzzle, in my opinion, that's best solved by the technique of using larger numbers to stand in for the smaller ones. 75 + 2 = 77 77 x 3 = 231 231 x 50 = 11550 11550 + 100 = 11650 11650 / 25 = 466 The workings of the problem look like this: ((75 + 2) x 3 x 50 + 100) / 25 = 466. What I've done is just multiply 77 x 3 x 2 (50 / 25) and then added 4 (100 / 25) because 77 x 6 is 4 short of the target. The trick is finding the baseline number to work with, and then everything else is just a matter of basic arithmetic. Once you become used to seeing puzzles in this way, the size of the numbers involved ceases to matter. I also got the conundrum. There was just something about that arrangement of letters, perhaps it was the SU together and the two F's in close conjunction, that made it evident.
Fantastic, thanks for posting an explanation. You are right--once you start identifying the patterns, it becomes easy to solve the numbers rounds involving large numbers.
