LUGNET News : ~2801/


Owen Dive /

Solution to Currantsy Pears

All you have is a bunch of seemingly random numbers and dots. It seems pretty clear that each number is a label for each dot. But what could the numbers represent?

If you don’t recognise any of the numbers you might try throwing some of them into a search engine. Hence or otherwise, you will find that they aren’t that random after all. You can pretty quickly work out that 1609 relates to 5280 in that 1609 meters = 5280 feet = 1 mile.

In fact, each of the numbers has a partner, and your job is to pair them up - you should be reassured that you are on the right track because “pair” is a homophone of one of the words in the title. The correct pairings are:

One mile	5280 feet	1609 meters

One atmosphere	1013.25 hPa	29.92 in.Hg

One right angle	90 degrees	1.57 radians^

One g	9.8 m/s/s	32.2 f/s/s

Boiling point of water	100 degrees Celsius	212 degrees Farenheit

Representation of the number	5 Decimal	101 Binary

One schooner	285 ml (in South Australia)	425 ml (in the rest of the country)

Ok, so now you’ve got pairs of dots. The natural thing to do is draw line segments between the dots of each pair. When you do this, you get something that looks a lot like $, except in the ‘American style’^^ with two vertical lines. At this point you should be very excited, because “currency” is a homophone of the other word in the puzzle’s title.

There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go next, which is good because you’re on the home straight. I said that I chose this representation of the puzzle because it was topical, and if you haven’t had your head under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you’ll know that the Australian Dollar and the US Dollar are very close to/have reached/have surpassed (depending on the situation at the time you read this!) parity.

The answer, then, is US Dollar, the ‘currantsy’ that is now ‘peared’ with our own. The fruit thing, I’m afraid, was somewhat of a red herring. I hope you didn’t go too far down that path - that would have been (wait for it) fruitless.

^ One could argue that one right angle is also equal 100 Grads. In fact I didn’t see that until I came to write up this solution. Besides, that would leave 212 to pair up with 1.57, which just doesn’t make sense!

^^ Or so I thought. Apparently I was mistaken in the belief that Americans drew their dollar signs with two vertical lines. It is only former colonies of Portugal that do this nowadays. That’ll teach me to create a puzzle like this without doing my research!

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