THE HINDU IN SCHOOL I TUESDAY I FEBRUARY 25 I 2014

Thought for today

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
J.K. Rowling

6 MELANGE
MAGIC SQUARE PUZZLE
QWIKIPEDIA
What is Qwikipedia? PUZZLE 178
1. Circles of diameter 1 inch and 3 inches have the same centre. The smaller circle is painted red, and the portion outside the smaller circle and inside the larger circle is painted blue. What is the ratio of the blue-painted area to the red-painted area? 2. Which year was celebrated as International Mathematical Year? Solution 1. 8. Area of the red painted portion = Area of the smaller circle = pi x (1/2)^2 = pi/4 and area of the larger circle = pi x (3/2)^2 = 9/4 x pi. Hence area of the blue painted portion = area of larger circle area of smaller circle = 9/4 x pi - pi/4 = 2 x pi. Hence the required ratio = (2 x pi)/(pi/4) = 8. 2. The year 2000 was celebrated as International Mathematical Year.

Anjana Krishnan

P U Z Z L E 178

Fill the empty cells using numbers from 1 to 64 each only once such that 1) Each row, column and two main diagonals of each 4x4 sub square gives the magic sum of 130. 2) Each 2 x 2 square marked in the same colour gives the sum of 130. 3) The center 2 x 2 marked in black border in each 4x4 sub square gives a sum of 130. 4) Group of cells in boxes within dotted lines is a cage. Cage sum is mentioned at the top in respective colours.

FACE TO FACE

Jatin Suhas Yadav, Class VI, Fiitjee World School, Hyderabad, was among those who answered correctly. Good job!

ww.magiicsquarepuzzles.com(9840662780)

S o l u t i o n 178

He is a former President who has the distinction of having been ousted twice from Presidency, the second time just last week. Can you identify him? Hint: Take a look at today's World page.
Monday's answer: Nicols Maduro

in addition to tennis the grand slam French Open is held here and the Ever been on Wikipedia to look up famous cycling race Tour de France. an article? More often than not, we start with one topic, click on a few Basketball links and within no time are reading The game of basketball was origiabout something else. Qwikipedia is a nally conceived in Massachusetts, game that tries to quench this curi- U.S. by a physical trainer of the Youth osity in us. Mens Christian Association TrainThe objective is to get to a partic- ing School, in Springeld in 1891. ular wiki page, starting from a specifWhile the sport received wide supic article, using minimal clicks. There port at the college level in the U.S. it is no single correct answer, so we was not until the 1920s that profesmight surprise ourselves by nding sionalizing the sport began. new routes each time! By then several teams abounded in the U.S. and in the year 1946 the Tuesdays Traveller Basketball Association of America (BAA) was formed. The BAA merged Braille > Carmelo Anthony with the National Basketball League Braille in 1949 to form the National BasketThere is a specic writing system ball Association (NBA) that we know for the visually impaired that was today. Some popular stars in the NBA this created by Frenchman Louise Braille who became blind after an accident season include Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and in his childhood. The Braille system, named after Pau Gasol. him, was based on a system of night writing developed by Charles Barbier Carmelo Anthony who developed it for Napoleans arNicknamed Melo, Carmelo Anmies. The system was meant for Na- thony plays for the New York franpolean's soldiers to communicate chise called New York Knicks in the during night time when at war. NBA. In 1821, Barbier visited the Royal Anthony has been a prolic player Institute for the Blind in Paris where in the NBA since he was drafted in he met Louise Braille. Braille pro- the Denver Nuggets team in 2003. posed a series of changes to Barbiers In the 2012 London Olympic system to make it easier to under- Games, Anthony scored 37 points in stand. a game against Nigeria breaking the Over the years, several modica- US Mens Olympic teams record for tions were made to the system and the most points in a game. today Braille is more of an independent system of writing for the visually So the path that we have traversed today is: impaired. Braille > Paris > Basketball > Paris Carmelo Anthony Three clicks! Hop over. Its time Situated on River Seine, Paris, the capital city of France is one of the for the next question: important centres of art, education, culture and history in the world to- Wednesdays Wanderer day. Scooby Doo > Subhas Chandra Its most attractive landmarks are Bose the Louvre Museum, the Eiffel tower Send in your paths for the above to (in picture) and the Arc de Triomphe. school@thehindu.co.inwith the PHOTOS: AP, AFP, K. Football, basketball, rugby are some subject Qwikipedia. Do include MURALI KUMAR of the popular sports in the country your name, class and school!

Understanding poverty
Poverty eradication is one of the foremost issues that concern economists around the world
Tanya Thomas

Which Harry Potter character are you?

Why are these quizzes so popular?
NEW YORK: For a compulsive

A book of puzzles
CHENNAI: Pie Mathematics Association, an association of Math lovers, has recently released a booktitled (5+1+2)^3 Charming Puzzles. It is a collection of 512puzzlestargeted at students appearing for various competitive exams. Thepuzzlescover all branches of basic mathematics. Prof. Ramanujam and Prof. K. Srinivas from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Taramani, Chennai released the book. It is priced at Rs.100. The association has also published many other books on mathematics the recent ones being Engalin Anbar (biography of mathematician Ramanujam in Tamil), Mathematical Amusements (a book of puzzles, jokes, quotations and important dates in history) and Engalin Ennangal (amazing facts about numbers, their signicance and applications from ancient to modern time).

One of the big moral dilemmas that governments, and the economists who guide them, have to deal with is inequality. Clearly, no one deserves to be poor. But if you give everybody the same benets, regardless of what work they do or how well they do it, there is no longer any incentive for people to be efficient. Still, governments must take inequality very seriously and at least ensure that all its citizens have access to basic rights, like food, health, education and a place to call home. This is especially important in a country like India, where there are more people who struggle to make ends meet than those who are comfortably well-off. Believe it or not, poverty eradication and reducing inequality is a much-debated issue not only in poor countries in Asia and Africa, but even in countries we consider developed, like those in North America and Europe, even though the poor in the latter countries may be better off than the poor here.

THIS WEEKS QUESTION

Find the Gini Coefficients for urban India in 2005 and 2011. Has inequality in India increased or decreased in this period?

online quiz-taker like Chrissy Noh, the temptation was too great to resist Which sandwich are you? After answering a series of unscientic, seemingly unrelated questions, which included selecting her favourite doughnut from a lineup of frosted pastries. And shes not the only one. Chances are, youve been doing it, too. A recent explosion of silly online personality quizzes, most of them created by the young social media mavens at Buzzfeed.com, has everybody talking about which state they really ought to be living in and which Harry Potter character they really are. Experts say

the phenomenon isnt surprising given the age-old fascination with that central question Who AM I? and a desire to compare ourselves with others in a social mediaobsessed society. What makes these online quizzes so alluring is that they can be instantaneously shared with hundreds of friends on Facebook for instant feedback, says a psychology teacher. In our age, were constantly reecting on who we are, and technology has really changed the way we interact. I think we are constantly engaging in social comparison and thinking about where we stand.AP

LAST WEEKS ANSWER

What would be the yield if the price of Companys A bond (Rs 100) rises to Rs 110? Ans: The yield would be 9.09 per cent. {(10/110)*100} = 9.09
PHOTO: K. BHAGYA PRAKASH

THE WOW COLUMN

Megha Bajaj

The perfect weight?

Our idea of beauty should not be based on what we see on TV or fashion shows
Another way of expressing this inequality is by using the Gini Coefficient. Created more than a hundred years ago, it reduces a lot of data regarding poverty and inequality in a country to a single number. We can then compare the Gini Coefficients of different countries to see which ones have the most equal or unequal societies. The Gini Coefficient value is in the range of zero to one. If a country has a value of zero, it means the country is perfectly equal and every citizen has the same income/wealth as every other citizen. A value of one means the country is perfectly unequal, with all wealth belonging to one person and everybody else being poor. Naturally, all countries have values that fall between these two extremes, but the higher the number, the more unequal the country is. Got questions on business or economics? Ask tanya.et@thehindu.co.in. As teenagers, there is one question we often ask ourselves are we of the right weight? Are we too thin? Too fat? Or just right? Being on the slim side, I have often wondered if I was perhaps a bit too skinny and looked like a scarecrow. My close friend, a bit on the plump side, constantly worried about being too fat. One day, when my friend and I were studying for exams together, I was cribbing about being too thin and she about being too fat. Suddenly we both looked at each other and started laughing. We realised that no matter how much we weighed, it would never seem right. Once she left, I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself. I thought to myself how in different countries, the denition of perfect weight was different. Perhaps, there was no such thing as the perfect weight. Over the next few days as I met people, and interacted with some of them whom I really admired, I realized that none of them really t in to my perfect weight categorisation but it never made them look any less beautiful or handsome in my eyes. I realised feeling healthy was important doing regular exercise and keeping myself strong but I

A persistent problem Because poverty has always been an issue along with economic development, economists have studied it for long. One way of looking at the problem is from the point of view of the inequality of distribution. That means, you add up all the money earned by people in a country and ask the following questions: Does a large portion of the total income go to a few rich people? Or is most of the total income shared by the majority of people? Earlier this month, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, made very

important comments about inequality. She said that the richest 85 people in the world own the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the world's population. In India, she added, the wealth of all our billionaires is now 12 times what they owned 15 years ago. This increase in wealth could have eliminated poverty in India not once, but twice! But the rst step in understanding and eliminating poverty is accurately measuring exactly how many poor people there really are, that is, what is a persons income and wealth. (Income is total amount of cash and benets

a person receives in a year, including a salary, a government scholarship for his children or an LPG subsidy. Wealth refers to accumulated income, or the assets a person has, like a house, a bike or a bank deposit.) In India, the Planning Commission draws the poverty line based on daily consumption. If you live in a village and spend more than Rs 27 a day on your daily needs or live in a city and spend more than Rs 30, the government no longer considers you poor.

MONEY MATTERS

The Gini coefficient Obviously, these are extremely low limits for measuring poverty. But even with such low limits, 269 million Indians are still (ofcially) poor. According to the governments estimates, if you randomly pick ve Indians, at least one of them has less than Rs 27/30 to live on each day. Thats an embarrassing number of poor people for a developing country.

FILE PHOTO: R.RAGU

shouldnt have to worry too much about what I weighed. Advertisements, fashion shows and television programmes may create a very misleading picture of beauty in our minds. Comparing ourselves to these perfect people we see on screen is not only silly but a big waste of time. Ever since I real-

ised this, the way I look at myself has changed. (Megha Bajaj is the founder of Wonder of Words, a 'make a difference' organisation that aims to bring excellent life skills and language skills to adults and children. To know more, write to megha@wonderofwords.org)