Riddle Me This: Boxes of Cash!
Test your skills of deduction with the June 2023 edition of Riddle Me This: Boxes of Cash!
There are three closed boxes on a table. Each box contains $5, $10, and $20 respectively, in five-dollar bills. The $10 box contains two five-dollar bills; the $5 box contains one five-dollar bill; and the $20 box contains four five-dollar bills.
However, they are labeled incorrectly. Someone has taken out three five-dollar bills from Box A.
Can we now determine the correct labels and real contents of the boxes?
Click to Reveal Answer
meh, respectively speaking.
Should have been stated that all boxes were labeled incorrectly.
The premise of B having $5 vs. the $10 as labeled doesn’t have any basis. Box C could have the $5 and A & C were mislabeled, giving the contents A ($20), B ($10) and C ($5).
The premise of B having $5 vs. the $10 as labeled doesn’t have any basis. Box C could have the $5 and A & C were mislabeled, giving the contents A ($20), B ($10) and C ($5).
If it was always the case that one box had $5, one box had $10 and one box had $20, the only way someone could take 3-$5 bills from box A is that it had $20 in it, so not it has $5 in it. Combining the assumption then that the 3-$5 bills were placed in another box, plus the premise that the boxes are incorrectly labeled, that would mean that the 3-$5 bills were placed in box B, which had $5 in it but now has $20 in it. That would mean that box C has $10 in it. Summary: Box A – $5, Box B – $20, Box C – $10 unless my initial assumptions were incorrect.
It did say “However, THEY are labeled incorrectly, so you have to assume “they” refers to all boxes.
If someone took $15 from Box A, then it originally had $20. But now it has $5, so it is labelled correctly. I have no idea where the $15 went. As someone stated above, if I had known all were labelled incorrectly and I had known that the $15 wasn’t really removed from Box A, then the rest of the deduction could have been made.
Like all engineers, I read way too much into this!
The only way you can get a solution is if all boxes were labeled incorrectly, so there is only one possible answer. The problem does state that the boxes were labeled incorrectly.