PHEASANT-SHOOTING.
(
Unclassified Problems.)
A Cockney friend, who is very apt to draw the long bow, and is evidently
less of a sportsman than he pretends to be, relates to me the following
not very credible yarn:--
"I've just been pheasant-shooting with my friend the duke. We had
splendid sport, and I made some wonderful shots. What do you think of
this, for instance? Perhaps you can twist it into a puzzle. The duke and
I were crossing a field when suddenly twenty-four pheasants rose on the
wing right in front of us. I fired, and two-thirds of them dropped dead
at my feet. Then the duke had a shot at what were left, and brought down
three-twenty-fourths of them, wounded in the wing. Now, out of those
twenty-four birds, how many still remained?"
It seems a simple enough question, but can the reader give a correct
answer?
Answer:
The arithmetic of this puzzle is very easy indeed. There were clearly 24
pheasants at the start. Of these 16 were shot dead, 1 was wounded in the
wing, and 7 got away. The reader may have concluded that the answer is,
therefore, that "seven remained." But as they flew away it is clearly
absurd to say that they "remained." Had they done so they would
certainly have been killed. Must we then conclude that the 17 that were
shot remained, because the others flew away? No; because the question
was not "how many remained?" but "how many still remained?" Now the poor
bird that was wounded in the wing, though unable to fly, was very active
in its painful struggles to run away. The answer is, therefore, that the
16 birds that were shot dead "still remained," or "remained still."
