Cheque paid with dollars and cents swapped
Question
A bank clerk cashing a man's cheque mixed up the units: the cents figure was paid out as dollars and the dollars figure as cents. The man, who arrived with no money, did not count it, bought a 5-cent sweet, and then found that what he had left was precisely double the cheque's face value. What was the cheque for?
Short answer
$31.63. Let the cheque be dollars and cents. Then , i.e. , whose solution with is , . Check: he received $63.31, and after 5 cents has $63.26, twice $31.63.
Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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