You can easily "tile" an 8x8 chessboard with 32 2x1 tiles, meaning that you can place these 32 tiles on the board and cover every square.
But if you take away two opposite corners from the chessboard, it becomes impossible to tile this new 62-square board.
Can you explain why tiling this board isn't possible?
Color in the chessboard, alternating with red and blue tiles. Then color all of your tiles half red and half blue. Whenever you place a tile down, you can always make it so that the red part of the tile is on a red square and the blue part of the tile is on the blue square.
Since you'll need to place 31 tiles on the board (to cover the 62 squares), you would have to be able to cover 31 red squares and 31 blue squares. But when you took away the two corners, you can see that you are taking away two red spaces, leaving 30 red squares and 32 blue squares. There is no way to cover 30 red squares and 32 blue squares with the 31 tiles, since these tiles can only cover 31 red squares and 31 blue squares, and thus, tiling this board is not possible.
I run over fields and woods all day. Under the bed at night I sit, never alone. My tongue hangs out, up and to the rear, waiting to be filled in the morning. What am I?
I drift forever with the current down these long canals they've made.
Tame, yet wild, I run elusive, multitasking to your aid.
Before I came, the world was darker. Colder, sometimes, rougher, true.
But though I might make living easy, I'm good at killing people too.
When Manish was three years old he carved a nail into his favorite tree to mark his height. Six years later at age nine, Manish returned to see how much higher the nail was. If the tree grew by five centimeters each year, how much higher would the nail be.
The nail would be at the same height since trees grow at their tops.