Sandy Wood
Brain Game: Negative Capital
by Sandy Wood - July 6, 2009 - 7:30 AM

THE SOLUTION:

The letter “W” can be found in Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. No state capital, however, has a ”W” in its name.

Pages: 1 2
« Previous Post   -   Next Post »
Click here to get a Risk-Free issue of mental_floss magazine
Comments (5)

  1. My first thought was to think of Scrabble tiles in the 3-4 point range. I got lucky and thought of this one pretty quick (thanks to the \New\ states).

    recaptcha: dogtrot $1-billion
    (Sounds like a sign of the times…)

    posted by Tom in GA on 7-6-2009 at 9:11 am

  2. It took me a while, I had to go through almost the entire alphabet.

    Thanks Sandy!

    posted by Sue on 7-6-2009 at 10:34 am

  3. I almost said K (I had 7 states in my list when I stopped and switched over to W). I too employed a list of the alphabet and started exercising that fifth grade useless trivia, and answering that age old question of will I ever use this information again?

    Thanks, Sandy! I like it when you mix in these types of questions with the mathematic ones!

    posted by Carolyn on 7-6-2009 at 2:20 pm

  4. My first thought was odd letters such as X and Q, but I couldn’t find eleven states with either letter so my next thought was W. I must say I was suprised when I found that no capitals contain W, relatively common letter.

    posted by Matt Allcorn on 7-6-2009 at 3:51 pm

  5. I listed all the letters and started by spelling out a few capitals and striking out letters. After just a few, “W” stood out as one that I could think of a lot of states for . . .

    posted by Hodge on 7-6-2009 at 7:29 pm

Comment

commenting policy