Weighing was never so tricky!
Number Theory
Level
pending
You have an unlimited supply of 5-gram and 8-gram weights that may be used in a pan balance .if you use only these weights and place them only in one pan ,then find the largest number of grams that you cannot weight?
The answer is 27.
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1 solution
This is sometimes referred to as the Chicken McNugget theorem, in which you could only used to buy packs of Chicken McNuggets in 9 or 20; so the question would be asked, "What's the largest number of Chicken McNuggets you could not purchase?". In general, if you are given two co-prime numbers, we'll call them "m" and "n", the formula is mn-m-n. So, that means the answer would be 5(8) - 5 - 8, or 27 grams.