Test your skills of deduction with the June 2023 edition of Riddle Me This: Boxes of Cash!
There are three closed boxes on a table. Each box contains $5, $10, and $20 respectively, in five-dollar bills. The $10 box contains two five-dollar bills; the $5 box contains one five-dollar bill; and the $20 box contains four five-dollar bills.
However, they are labeled incorrectly. Someone has taken out three five-dollar bills from Box A.
Can we now determine the correct labels and real contents of the boxes?
![moneybox-setup Money box original boxes](https://peimpact.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/moneybox-setup-1.png)
Click to Reveal Answer
meh, respectively speaking.
Should have been stated that all boxes were labeled incorrectly.
The premise of B having $5 vs. the $10 as labeled doesn’t have any basis. Box C could have the $5 and A & C were mislabeled, giving the contents A ($20), B ($10) and C ($5).
The premise of B having $5 vs. the $10 as labeled doesn’t have any basis. Box C could have the $5 and A & C were mislabeled, giving the contents A ($20), B ($10) and C ($5).
If it was always the case that one box had $5, one box had $10 and one box had $20, the only way someone could take 3-$5 bills from box A is that it had $20 in it, so not it has $5 in it. Combining the assumption then that the 3-$5 bills were placed in another box, plus the premise that the boxes are incorrectly labeled, that would mean that the 3-$5 bills were placed in box B, which had $5 in it but now has $20 in it. That would mean that box C has $10 in it. Summary: Box A – $5, Box B – $20, Box C – $10 unless my initial assumptions were incorrect.
It did say “However, THEY are labeled incorrectly, so you have to assume “they” refers to all boxes.
If someone took $15 from Box A, then it originally had $20. But now it has $5, so it is labelled correctly. I have no idea where the $15 went. As someone stated above, if I had known all were labelled incorrectly and I had known that the $15 wasn’t really removed from Box A, then the rest of the deduction could have been made.
Like all engineers, I read way too much into this!
The only way you can get a solution is if all boxes were labeled incorrectly, so there is only one possible answer. The problem does state that the boxes were labeled incorrectly.