Yesterday’s Problem:
A hungry bookworm finds several volumes of Collier’s encyclopedia on a shelf. He starts at the front cover of the first volume and begins eating, and gets all the way to the back of the back cover of the third volume. If the covers are each 1/2 cm think, and the pages of each volume are 8 cm think, how far did the bookwork get?
Answer:
The answer is “9 cm” – the front cover of the first volume is touching the back cover of volume 2, and the back cover of volume 3 is touching the front cover of volume 2 – so the bookworm only eats through all of volume 2 – you can see this if you place your books against each other.
Today’s Problem
There are 3 friends at Shannon’s birthday party. Each is allowed to make one vertical cut to the cake. What is the maximum amount of pieces of cake that can be cut?