Last month only two people managed to come up with the correct solution, as well as the reason why. Therefore, I held back their postings until now.

The answer is that you should certainly take the odds of 30:1 on offer — because your chances of winning the wager are considerably better than that.

Anyway, for those of you still puzzling over the chances of two people having their birthday on the same day in the year, in a room of 23 unrelated people … here’s how you work it out.
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Imagine you have just walked into a room of 22 unrelated people, whom you’ve never met before.

Then, someone poses the question:
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As you could see from the various responses posted for this Mind Bender … there is clearly more than one way to share the Wine Barrels between the three brothers.

However, the challenge this time was to come up with the solution that was the most elegant in its simplicity.
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A wine merchant dies leaving his three sons …

• Seven Barrels full of wine,
• Seven Barrels half full of wine,
• Seven Barrels completely empty.
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The responses to this month’s Mind Bender were really quite interesting. And some of them stemmed from making an assumption based upon social bias.
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First, you’ll need to take a look at the picture, within the full posting.

And then, simply decide how you believe the doctor would have replied.

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It’s not quite the end of the month, but those of you wanting to put forward a solution seem to have done so by now. And I deliberately held off posting your proposed answers — so that everyone could submit without any distraction.

But all your answers are up there now.

In posing the Mind Bender for June, I suggested that you need to quickly choose between an Intuitive or Deliberate thinking, in your approach to finding a solution.

Intuitively, you immediately think that, by adding just 2 metres to the length of the rope around the Earth … the gap would be extremely small. It may be large enough to slip a coin under; but certainly not large enough for you to crawl under.

But the solution to this Bender is found by using Deliberate thinking.
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As you tackle these challenges each month, you first have to decide whether your approach needs to be Intuitive or Deliberate. And the trick is for you to quickly choose the correct mode of thinking for each one.

Let’s take a look at this month’s challenge …
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The idea of introducing these monthly challenges was to help you to stretch your thinking. But sadly, some people are simply using Google to discover the solutions.

This month, the challenge was to come up with the common words that contained five consecutive Vowels and Consonants.

The emphasis being on “consecutive” and “common” …
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Your challenge this month is to come up with the every-day word, which contains five consecutive vowels.

By way of a clue, it describes what most of us end up doing each day — particularly at lunchtime.
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