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It's a Puzzlement
by John P. RobertsonAn actuary picked out four items at her local convenience store. To occupy her mind, she multiplied the prices in her head while she shopped. She was surprised to find that the product, $7.11, was related to the name of the store. She was even more amazed when the clerk totaled her purchases, and the sum of the prices also turned out to be $7.11. How much did each item cost?
Scrambled Addition
The previous problem was to substitute digits for the letters in the following addition, subject to certain constraints given in the last issue.
The solution is given by 934137.63 + 3961325.37 = 4895463. Most solvers found some relations that helped narrow the number of possible solutions, and then used trial and error. For instance, from the rightmost two columns, one immediately has that Y+L=10 and T+A=T+Y=9. It follows that C=9 because the sum of the third column from the left must be 9 or 10, and cannot be 10. Other relations can be found, and a little trial and error is needed, leading to the unique solution.
We thank Chris Yaure for creating this extremely popular puzzle. Readers are encouraged to propose problems for this column. They shouldn't be too hard, or too easy, or too well-known.
Solutions were sent in by Mary Ellen Cardascia, Oscar Chow, Michael Claborn, Stanley Dorf, Dianne Fiebrink, Kurt D. Hines, Randy Holmberg, Mark Kertzner, Allen Lowe, Don Manis, Chaim Markowitz, Rich Newell, Khanh Nguyen, Jabran Noor, Riccardio Ochierstio, Apryle Oswald, Jason Santos, Rob Schmid, Leroy J. Simon, David Spiegler, Kathie Terrill, W. Mont Timmins, Anthony C. Yoder.
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