RAY: Hi, we're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us, Click and Clack, the Tappert brothers, and we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and, of course, the answer to last week's puzzler. And, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, this was from the matchstick series. I think I'd asked you to get 16 matchsticks.
TOM: And I've got them right here. Go ahead.
RAY: And use them to create this half of an equation. You start with one, Roman numerals, right?
TOM: Roman numerals.
RAY: One, OK, which is one matchstick. And then you use two matchsticks to make a plus sign.
TOM: Got it, plus.
RAY: Two.
TOM: Roman numeral, two.
RAY: Roman numeral, two, plus --
TOM: II.
RAY: Right.
TOM: Plus.
RAY: OK, I, I, I.
TOM: I, I, I.
RAY: Captain. Plus I, I, I, I.
TOM: I, I, I, I. I, yeye, yeye.
RAY: And that adds up to 10.
TOM: Three, six, 10, yeah.
RAY: Anyway, the question was move and reuse one matchstick to make this sum equal not to 10, but to four. And what you do is you take the plus sign between the one and the two, take the vertical matchstick, and put it horizontally in front of the one, so now the thing reads minus one, minus two, plus three plus four equals what?
TOM: Oh, four.
RAY: And a lot of people have trouble with this because the idea of putting a negative sign in front.
TOM: Yeah, I had trouble with that. Sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade.
RAY: That encompassed 12 years. Anyway, do we have a winner?
TOM: You bet we have a winner. The winner is Sue Goodney from Bloomington, Indiana, and for having her answer selected at random from among all the correct answers that we got, Sue is going to get a $25 gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division at the Car Talk section of cars.com. And with that gift certificate, she can get a copy of our new music CD, "Car Talk, Car Tunes," which includes my brother's anthem, "They're all Jerks."
RAY: Anyway, we'll have a brand new, geez I guess we'd have to call it a mathematical puzzler --
TOM: I love them.
RAY: -- coming up in the third half of the show today. So stick around for that. It's a doozy. A doozy. It's also folkloric and historic and all that. It's got everything. It's got a little bit of everything.
TOM: Don't they all.
RAY: Misinformation, you name it.
TOM: Obfuscation, misinformation.
RAY: Anyway, if you have a question about your car right now, or anything else you want to know about, or to be misinformed about, you can call us. The number is 888-CARTALK, that's 888-227-8255. Hello, you're on Car Talk.
[ Car Talk Puzzler ]
