NPR's Puzzlemaster Will Shortz quizzes one of our listeners, and has a challenge for everyone at home.
Challenge from Nov. 6:
Last week's challenge came from listener Tom Sylke, from Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin.
Take a familiar brand name, seen along roads and highways in the United States. It has five letters, two syllables. The first syllable, phonetically, is a word that is the opposite of the word spelled by the second syllable. What brand name is it?
Answer: Citgo.
Winner: Dr. Laurie Abbott from Las Cruces, New Mexico.
This week we have a two-week challenge: Write down these two chemical symbols, on the first line write LI, for lithium, and FE for iron. Underneath write NE for neon. And AR for Argon. Reading across you get the four letter words, life and near. And reading down you get, line and fear, completing a miniature word square composed only of chemical symbols. The object is to create a 3X3 square, composed of nine chemical symbols, in which each of the three rows across and each of the columns down, spells a word. You may use either one letter or two letter chemical symbols, but the idea is to use as many two letter ones as possible. Only un-capitalized words are allowed. Our source for acceptable words will be Merriam-Webster 11th Collegiate Dictionary.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
