Jun 08, 2024
Time for the new puzzler. This one is interesting. Here we go.
It is a little known fact, for the purposes of this puzzler, that potatoes are 99% water and only 1% potato. Or 1% dry matter, the stuff that makes a potato a potato.
So, imagine you were to take 100 pounds of potatoes and you set them out on your back porch to dry out. You leave them out in the sun. When you do this, they will start to dry out.
As they dry out, of course the water begins to evaporate. And after a while enough water has evaporated so that the potatoes are now 98% water.
If you were to weigh those potatoes at that moment, when they are 98% water, how much lighter would they be?
Good luck.
Answer time.
So, after letting these 100 pounds of potatoes dry out, and they are now 98% water instead of 99%, how much lighter would they be?
If you were to weigh the potatoes at that moment, when they're 98% water, how much would they weigh?
Here is the answer.
We had stated unequivocally that potatoes are 99% water and 1% potato.
So, if you do the math, 1% of 100 pounds is one pound. So when it is 98% water instead of 99%, you'll have 2% that is no longer water.
So 2% of the new weight of the mass will still be equal to that one pound, because one pound is potato. 2% of 50 pounds equals one pound.
So the potato weight is now 50 pounds now, instead of 100.
Tricky one.
