First Series - coming soon!

The Puzzles

1. John Waller of Bradford writes to say that he recently gave his daughter £88.88 for her birthday. Why that particular amount?

2. What do a girl, a boy, a poet, a singer, a country, a remote object and a poorly sea creature have in common?

3. Ann, Beth and Clare were celebrating their shared birthday and they were debating as to how many candles should go on the cake. Ann's age is the square root of Beth's age plus the cube root of Clare's age. Beth's age is Ann's age plus the cube root of Clare's age plus 14, while Clare's age is the cube root of Ann's age plus Beth's age. Can you help them?

First, a crossword clue:

4. Most important for 1999 say (5 letters)

5. I have 10 cards on each of which is written one of the digits from 0 to 9 inclusive. Each card bears a different digit. I take one of these cards and I place it in my pocket and it doesn't feature in the rest of this puzzle. I have 9 cards remaining. I take 2 of them and I form a 2-figure number, I take 3 more of them and I form a 3-figure number and I take the last 4 and form a 4-figure number. The sum of those 3 numbers is 1999.

What's the number on the card in my pocket?

6. This puzzle was inspired by watching a friend tackling a 1000-piece jigsaw. Simon noticed that his friend sorted out the edge pieces first presumably as they were easily identifiable and there are comparatively few of them compared with the rest of the pieces. He thought a little and realised that in a 3 x 3 jigsaw there would be one centre piece and eight edge pieces, so it would be simpler to start off with the middle piece first with such a small puzzle.

Simon then went off and found 2 different puzzles for his friend, either of which had the same number of edge pieces as non-edge pieces. What was the total number of pieces of each of the puzzles? They were different sizes...

7. On a ship there are 4 pirates: Captain Maslanka, 1st Officer Bryant, Newing the Cook and Bodycombe swabbing the decks! (That is the pecking order). There are 1,000 doubloons to share out. The lowliest pirate, ie Bodycombe, is going to suggest how they should be divided, then everyone will have a vote and if more than half agree then that way of splitting the money will be carried out. If there is not a more than 50 per cent majority, Bodycombe will be thrown off the ship and the next highest up the rankings will make a suggestion as to how to split up the gold, and so on with the same risk of failure.

What should Bodycombe do?

8. Don Cappuccino has bought a Robo-chum to help him around the house. Some friends are coming around for drinks and he wants to put some socks on as he is conventional. To prove he is not too conventional he decides to wear one blue sock and one other sock that doesn't match. Next door he has 19 red socks, 20 white socks and 41 blue socks - all mixed up in a drawer. He is too lazy to fetch these himself so he sends Robo-chum, who only works in monochrome but knows what a sock is and can count. So assume Robo-chum cannot tell the difference between a red sock, a white sock and a blue sock. How many socks must Robo-chum fetch in order for Don Cappuccino to be sure of having his odd pair of socks - one of which is blue?