Page:Carroll - Tangled Tale.djvu/159

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Answers to Knot X.
143

done correctly, but I can give her no honours, as I do not think the question will fairly bear her interpretation. Three Score and Ten makes it "19 and ⅜ths." Her solution has given me—I will not say "many anxious days and sleepless nights," for I wish to be strictly truthful, but—some trouble in making any sense at all of it. She makes the number of "pensioners wounded once" to be 310 ("per cent.," I suppose!): dividing by 4, she gets 77 and a half as "average percentage:" again dividing by 4. she gets 19 and ⅜ths as "percentage wounded four times." Does she suppose wounds of different kinds to "absorb" each other, so to speak? Then, no doubt, the data are equivalent to 77 pensioners with one wound each, and a half-pensioner with a half-wound. And does she then suppose these concentrated wounds to be transferable, so that ¾ths of these unfortunates can obtain perfect health by handing over their wounds to the remaining ¼th? Granting these suppositions, her answer is right; or rather, if the question had been "A road is covered with one inch of gravel, along 77 and a half per cent. of it. How much of it could be covered 4 inches deep with the same material?" her answer would have been right. But alas, that wasn't the question! Delta makes some most amazing assumptions: "let every one who has not lost an eye have lost an ear," "let every one who has not lost both eyes and ears have lost an arm."