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This was a popular problem that was answered correctly by many of you. The messages say "HELP ME" and "BROKEN".
Mathew Ladley from Saddleworth School reasoned as follows:
"For the first answer I narrowed down the possibilities of the broken pin - either the bottom right or the middle right one (since these hadn't been used). So then I just worked out what letter each symbol could possibly be, and worked it out from there..."
Ben Goulding from Whitgift School added:
"The dot on the middle right is not working. Some letters do not need this dot so do not get caught out."
Catherine Y and Yi Jean C from North London Collegiate decoded the second message as follows:
"We made a list of possible letters for each symbol, allowing either no mistakes or 1 mistake. We got a list as follows:
First letter could be: BFHL
Second letter could be: NORZ
Third letter could be: NORZ
Fourth letter could be: KLMOU
Fifth letter could be: DEHO
Sixth letter could be: MNPX
From here, we tried to make words:
The first two letters could either be Bo, Fo, Ho, Br or Lo.
We just tried various words until we got to BROKEN!!!"
Place the 16 different combinations of cup/saucer in this 4 by 4 arrangement so that no row or column contains more than one cup or saucer of the same colour.
Imagine you have six different colours of paint. You paint a cube using a different colour for each of the six faces. How many different cubes can be painted using the same set of six colours?
How many positive integers less than or equal to 4000 can be written down without using the digits 7, 8 or 9?