Riddle Me This: Mixing Medicine
Test your skills of deduction with the January 2022 edition of Riddle Me This: Mixing Medicine
You have been feeling very sick lately and decide to visit your doctor. He gives you two medications to take, Medicine Y and Medicine X. You are instructed to take one pill of each every day and the pills must be taken together. If you take less than this amount you will die from illness, and if you take more you will die from an overdose. When putting the pills away in your medicine cabinet you accidentally drop the bottles and three pills fall out. You count the remaining pills in each bottle and determine that on the floor there is one X pill and two Y pills. Unfortunately the pills look identical and you have no way of telling them apart.
How can you save the pills on the floor and still maintain the proper daily dosage and take all of the pills?
Click to Reveal Answer
That should work.
Break the unknowns in half and make two piles. Let’s say you have:
XXY and YYY
Add a 1/2 tablet of X to each pile. So:
XXXY and YYYX
Take my medicine. I choose XX and XY. I die.
Another absurd (but interesting) problem. It’s against FDA rules to not mukr the pills. I go back to the pharmacy and get 2 new prescriptions.
Throw away the pills on the floor, which are now contaminated. Go back to the pharmacy and purchase new pills to replace the contaminated ones. Your LIFE depends on it!