Exercises For The Brain
Book Trivia
1. The DaVinci Code opens with a murder in which famous museum?
2. Who is the bear in The Jungle Book?
3. Which Dickens character says, “Please, sir, I want some more”?
4. What are Peter Rabbit’s sisters’ names?
5. Which author wrote Jane Eyre?
6. What kind of clothing does Max wear in Where the Wild Things Are?
7. Which British author wrote Wuthering Heights?
8. In what book does Sam-I-Am try to get his picky friend to try an unusual breakfasat dish?
9. In what town is the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee set?
10. What is the real name of Dr.Seuss?
Stretch Your Brain
1. Seven houses each have seven cats. Each cat kills seven mice. Each of the mice, if alive, would have eaten seven ears of wheat. Each ear of wheat produces seven measures of flour. How many measures of flour were saved by the cars?
2. Can you lift a marble off a table using only a wineglass?
3. A baseball is tossed into the air. Which takes longer – its flight up or its drop back down?
4. A steel washer with a hole in the center is heated until the metal expands by 1 percent. Will the hole get larger or smaller or remain the same?
5. Why is the top of an airplane wing curved?
Answers
Book Trivia
1. Louvre
2. Baloo
3. Oliver Twist
4. Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail
5. Charlotte Bronte
6. A wolf suit
7. Emily Bronte
8. Green Eggs and Ham
9. Maycomb, Alabama
10. Theodor Seuss Geisel (he was not a doctor, but his mother always wanted him to be one, so he gave himself that title as an author)
Stretch Your Brain
1. 16,807 measures of flour. That’s 7 X 7x7x7x7. This puzzle, which comes from the ancient Egyptian time, was written by scribe Ahmes in 1850 BCE. It has inspired a great many variations over the thousands of years since its creation.
2. Place the glass over the marble and move it around so that the marble starts to spin around the inside of the glass. Once the marble starts rotating, it will begin to rise off the table. When the marble is spinning fast enough, you can lift the glass off the table. The marble will not drop immediately. It will continue to spin around under its own momentum.
3. It takes longer to drop than to fly up. The ball has to work against air resistance on its way up, and so continuously loses energy. Thus, the total energy of a ball at a point on its way up is greater than the energy at the same height on its way down. Since the potential energy (its energy due to its height) is the same at both instances, the difference in energy must be due to the reduced kinetic energy. That means the falling ball is moving more slowly and will take more time to cover the same distance. Whew!
4. Every dimension of the washer will expand, so the hole will get larger too.
5. The wings of an airplane are designed so that air will rush across their upper surface faster than it rushes past the lower surface. For this reason, the top surface of the wings is made monger than the bottom. As described in
Bernoulli’s principle, that extra speed lowers the pressure above the wings, producing a net force from below called lift. That force keeps the airplane in the air as it moves forward. When an airplane is in midflight, the combined weight of
the plane, fuel, passengers, and cargo exert a heavy pull downward. However, that total weight is overcome by the lift, allowing the airplane to remain airborne.