Math Brain Teaser: Concentric Shapes or The Unkindest Cut of All, Part 2 of 2

If you missed Part 1, also writ­ten by puz­zle mas­ter Wes Car­roll, you can start there and then come back here to Part 2. Con­cen­tric Shapes: The Unkind­est Cut of All, Part 2 of 2.Difficulty: HARDER Type: MATH (Spatial)Question:Imagine a square with­in a cir­cle with­in a square.The cir­cle just grazes each square at exact­ly four points.Find the ratio of the area of the larg­er square to the smaller.In this puz­zle you are work­ing out many of the same skills as in Part I: spa­tial visu­al­iza­tion (occip­i­tal lobes), mem­o­ry (tem­po­ral lobes), log­ic (frontal lobes), plan­ning (frontal lobes), and hypoth­e­sis gen­er­a­tion (frontal lobes).Click to read the Solu­tion and Explanation.

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Math Brain Teaser: The Unkindest Cut of All, Part 1 of 2

Here is anoth­er math­e­mat­i­cal puz­zle from puz­zle mas­ter Wes Car­roll … The Unkind­est Cut Of All, Part 1 of 2.Difficulty: HARD.Type: MATH (Spatial).Question:The area of a square is equal to the square of the length of one side.So, for exam­ple, a square with side length 3 has area (3^2), or 9. What is the area of a square whose diag­o­nal is length 5?

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Brain Teaser: Dr. Nasty’s Giant Cube

Dr. Nasty’s Giant Cube. Dif­fi­cul­ty: HARDER. Type: HYBRID (Logic/Spatial). The dia­bol­i­cal Dr. Nasty has turned his Growth Ray on a per­fect cube that used to mea­sure one foot on a side. The new larg­er cube has twice the sur­face area of the orig­i­nal. Find the vol­ume of the larg­er cube.

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Stress Management Test

A close­ly mon­i­tored, sci­en­tif­ic study revealed that, in spite of the fact that the dol­phins are iden­ti­cal, a per­son under stress would find dif­fer­ences in the two dol­phins.… Look at the pho­to­graph, and if you find more than one or two dif­fer­ences, you may want to take a vacation.

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Brain Health Newsletter, March Edition

We have had anoth­er busy month behind us, and we’re look­ing for­ward to Brain Aware­ness Week March 12–18. Keep read­ing for the details (includ­ing a spe­cial offer in hon­or of Brain Aware­ness Week) … I. Press Cov­er­age II. Events III. Pro­gram Reviews IV. New Offer­ings V. Web­site and Blog Sum­ma­ry. Set your DVRs – Sharp­Brains is com­ing to the small screen! Our tele­vi­sion debut will be on CBS 13 West Sacramento’s “Good Day Sacra­men­to” on Mon­day, March 12. La Opin­ion, the most pres­ti­gious Span­ish-lan­guage paper in the US, fea­tured Sharp­Brains in a recent arti­cle “Secre­to para tri­un­far en los exámenes” (Secrets to Tri­umph­ing in Exams). Anoth­er great inter­na­tion­al pub­li­ca­tion was an arti­cle called “Training the Brain as Pos­si­ble as Train­ing the Body” in the promi­nent Ara­bic news­pa­per Anna­har. And Mark Muck­en­fuss of The Press-Enter­prise in River­side writes in “Train Your Brain”: “I would tend to believe that still we under­es­ti­mate the brain,” says Fer­nan­dez, whose back­ground is in edu­ca­tion­al train­ing and mar­ket­ing. He notes that recent stud­ies have shown when a brain is injured by a stroke, “those men­tal struc­tures recre­ate them­selves (with exer­cise). It means to me there are a lot of things we could real­ly do and many times we are not aware of them. We can­not promise to peo­ple you will only keep get­ting bet­ter until you are 200 years old. But I think peo­ple still under­es­ti­mate how flex­i­ble the brain real­ly is.”

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Brain Workout for Your Frontal Lobes

Your frontal lobes are home to your exec­u­tive func­tions, includ­ing pat­tern recog­ni­tion. Here’s a puz­zle to chal­lenge your abil­i­ty to uncov­er a pat­tern. In this puz­zle, three num­bers: 16, 14, and 38, need to be assigned to one of the rows of num­bers below. To which row should each num­ber be assigned — A, B,…

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