“You’re not supposed to add and subtract words,” said Sue.
Mrs. Jewls was taken aback. She had been adding and subtracting words all her life. “If you can’t add and subtract words,” she said, “what can you add and subtract?”
“Numbers,” said Sue. “Like one plus one.”
“What’s one plus one?” asked Mrs. Jewls.
“Two,” said Sue.
Mrs. Jewls was unsure, but she wrote it on the blackboard.
PROBLEM 12
g
g
“No!” screamed Sue. “You’re not supposed to write the words. You’re supposed to write the numbers.”
“What numbers?” asked Mrs. Jewls.
“One and two,” said Sue.
“But there isn’t a one or two anywhere in the problem,” said Mrs. Jewls.
What number does each letter represent if none of them represents either a 1 or 2?
g
e = ?lllln = ?llllo = ?llllt = ?llllw = ?
g
(CLUE Begin with the letter o. Is it even or odd? What’s the largest number it can be?)
g
g
Everybody in the class was interested in Sue’s unusual arithmetic. “What other problems do you know?” Mrs. Jewls asked her.
“There are millions,” said Sue. “One plus two equals three. Four plus seven equals eleven—”
She was interrupted by the laughter from the rest of the class.
“Five plus two equals seven,” she said.
The class was hysterical.
“Four plus eight equals twelve,” she asserted.
Everyone was laughing so hard that Mrs. Jewls had to ring the cowbell on her desk. “Don’t laugh,” she said. “It’s not nice to laugh at other people’s mistakes.”
“But I wasn’t mistaken,” Sue protested.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said Mrs. Jewls.
If you try to solve the following problems as before, with each letter representing a different number, you will find that each is impossible.