Workers and Wages

9^th May, 2010

The following question I heard during my childhood from an old “Cha Cha”…

There are 100 people including Male, Female and Children working in a paddy field. The landlord is liberal in allowing any number of male, female and children, at total of 100 workers per day.

As per daily wages, each male is paid Rs.7/-, each female is paid Rs.5/- and each kid is paid Rs.1/-. Concerning the quality of work, the landlord is not willing to pay more than Rs.250/- worth of work per day.

The question is, with in the limit of 100 workers per day, how many ways the worker’s leader can shuffle male, female and children such that they can yield Rs.250/- worth of work every day.

As usual, the emphasis is not in getting the answer, a school kid can guess atlest one solution by trail and error method. Interestingly, there are 13 possible solutions.

How to solve it…, simple, apply mathematics?