Sandy Wood
Brain Game: Roman Meal
by Sandy Wood - July 16, 2009 - 7:30 AM

bloghead_braingames.jpg

While you could outwit today’s Brain Game challenge the hard way, try to solve it without doing any writing or spreadsheet work; just use some common sense and logic and do it off the top of your head. You may be surprised at the correct answers. Good luck!

First, consider all the Roman numerals on a list that counts from 1 to 100. (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and so on, to C.) Done? Good. With those in mind:

1. Overall, which individual Roman numeral (I, V, X, L, or C) appears more often than any other on this 1-100 list?

2. Which one appears the fewest times?

3. Which two appear the exact same number of times?

Here are the ANSWERS.
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Comments (7)

  1. got it all….excellent quiz!

    posted by Ian on 7-16-2009 at 8:22 am

  2. veni vidi vici.

    posted by Kevin on 7-16-2009 at 10:30 am

  3. I figured “C” was the fewest.

    Trying to figure out the rest just seemed like too much busy-work.

    posted by John on 7-16-2009 at 12:23 pm

  4. I got the second answer. Figured the third based on process of elimination, but I figured answer 1 was I. I was so confident with that answer that I had to pull a roman numerals table off the internet to verify that you were right and I was wrong. Congrats as I lose. It is all those 30′s and 80′s that did me in.

    posted by Matt Allcorn on 7-16-2009 at 12:26 pm

  5. There is an easy way to do Roman numerals in an Excel spreadsheet… you can use the “=roman(A1)” command where A1 is the cell with the value you want to convert to a Roman numeral.

    I didn’t know this myself until I was coming up with this puzzle recently… it sure made things easier!

    posted by Sandy Wood on 7-16-2009 at 12:53 pm

  6. A question about the instructions:

    “While you could outwit today’s Brain Game challenge the hard way, try to solve it without doing any writing or spreadsheet work; just use some common sense and logic and do it off the top of your head.”

    Shouldn’t it say “the easy way” in the first part of the sentence? To me, a spreadsheet would be easier than doing it off the top of my head. Maybe I am missing something.

    posted by Emily on 7-16-2009 at 1:19 pm

  7. Emily, I see your point, but let me explain. What I meant was that it would only takes a few moments to come up with an answer mentally, while it would take a few minutes to jot down the numbers and count them individually.

    Plus, like Matt did above, I thought that most people would assume that “I” was the most common Roman numeral on the list, which is why I prompted folks to solve it in their heads instead of using assistance.

    posted by Sandy Wood on 7-16-2009 at 10:35 pm

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