ShmoopTube

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Here’s a question that will help you get your shmoop on…

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If it takes one of the king’s horses 40 minutes to put together Humpty Dumpty…

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…how long will it take for three of them working on it together?

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Assuming they’re not… you know… all hooves?

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And here are the potential answers...

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So… this question makes a big fat presumption that too many cooks aren’t spoiling the kitchen…

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and that 3 horses work 3 times as fast as one.

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But if we look through that likely falsehood, logically, if 40 over 1 minutes is how long

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it takes one horse to assemble an oversized omelet…

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…then it takes 40 over 3 minutes for 3 horses to do it.

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If we scan the answers, we note that 3 over 40 – answer A – has to be wrong because

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it can’t take just a few seconds…

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So we’re gonna say… neigh.

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The other answers reduce into minutes and seconds – so 40 divided by 3 is 13 and a

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third – and a third of a minute is 20 seconds… so we’re good with B.

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B, as in… “Better call for backup.”

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