You've got two pieces of rope. Each one burns for exactly one hour. The ropes are not identical. The ropes are not uniform (ie burning time is not proportional to length burned). Simply by burning the ropes, how can you measure a period of exactly 45 minutes?
by the way i was born in guildford are you at the uni there? i was offered a place to do my nursing training there but ended up going to birmingham (big mistake!)
First of all, no. The ropes are not uniform, so dividing them into four equal pieces would not necessarily give you four pieces of rope that each burn for 15 minutes. You have no way of knowing how long it takes to burn any fraction of length of either rope. Secondly, yes i'm on the Tonmeister music and sound recording course at the University of Surrey.
It only takes the same amount of free time as any other post if you use a bit of nous. Bloody americans and their lazy attitude towards applied thought
He's going to love a person called Blackie I'm sure! Come on, it's not that hard! If no-one posts the answer by the time I have to leave for church I'll just have to post it myself and then you'll all kick yourselves for not getting it!
The Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge. RC I'm only in it to sing in the Choir. My dad's seriously religious I'm not. My mum on the other hand is a half-hearted jew whilst my sister takes Judaism fairly seriously, or did for a while anyway. But I agreed to go along and sing, and boost the bass section (or tenor and alto as well when required). I'm even writing a mass setting for them, just for fun Come on, though, ROPES!
Well there are two reasons for writing a mass. Either to create something suitable for a latin choir to sing during an actual mass at church. Or, to creat a piece of music around the mass text to be performed in public, in a concert for example. If i'm writing a mass for the second reason, then yes I would include sax parts, and probably a small orchestra as well and write it for a large choir. However I'm doing this mass for the first reason, and it's only a small choir and I don't want to make it too complicated, just to give them something to add to their repertoire, for when I'm not around. Only about 2 and a half hours before I have to leave now! Come on!
I'd take one of them ropes and divide it into 4 equal pieces. then take 1/4 of it out and burn the rest I'd sell the other rope.
I'm afraid that won't work, Maes because the ropes are not uniform. They don't have the same thickness all the way through, so they won't burn half the time in half the length or anything like that. OK. here is the solution. Set fire to one end of one rope and both ends of the other. The rope which you burn from both ends will burn in exactly half an hour. At the end of that half hour, there'll be half an hour's rope left on the other rope which only burnt from one end. Set fire to the other end of that rope and it'll burn in a further 15 minutes, so you have a total of 45 minutes.
Wow, that's a pretty good one. I was thinking something like you put the ropes parallel to each other, lining up the ends on one side and lighting the other sides. When the burning points on the 2 ropes are at the same length, it would be 45 mins. Guess I was wrong though.
You know that a whole rope takes exactly 1 hr to burn. You know that for however long you burn a rope, there will be 1 hour minus that amount of time, still left to burn as the total burning time is 1 hour. So if you burn a rope for half an hour, you know you've got half an hour left. So if you burn a rope from both ends, that'll take half an hour. Half an hour from one end, half an hour from the other end, and they will meet up at some point, after exactly half an hour, although it won't necessarily be in the middle of the rope as the ropes are not uniform. Once you've done that, there's half an hour left on the rope that you burnt from only one end, since it's been burning for half an hour, so there must be half an hour left. So set fire to the other end, so the rope will burn twice as quickly and finish burning in just 15 minutes. So that's half an hour plus 15 minutes, 45 minutes in total. é chiaro?
