At the recent interdepartmental jam making contest, four lucky candidates took part to make the juiciest strawberry jam.
As it happens, the person who came last was the oldest. Glen was three years older than the person who came second. Drew was neither the oldest nor the youngest. Emery finished ahead of the 27-year-old, but didn't win. Alex was also unlucky this time, and didn't win either.
The ages of the contestants were 24, 27, 30 and 32.
Can you work out who finished where, and how old they were?
A million grains of sand is a heap. If we remove one grain of sand from this heap, we will still have a heap.
We can now keep repeating (2) until we only have a single grain of sand remaining.
Is this a heap? Clearly not. But what went wrong with our thinking?
This is called the Sorites paradox (soros being Greek for "heap") and is a classic paradox that has no real answer.
Both (1) and (2) are true, and we can indeed keep removing one grain of sand until we have a single grain remaining. If we remove one more grain, we're left with nothing, is this still a heap?
