Weekly puzzle 10
Lateral thinking…
Island On Fire
A man is stranded on an island 200m high surrounded by shark-infested waters. The wind is blowing from East to West. A fire begins in the Eastern most part of the island and is spreading rapidly through the bushes, trees and shrub towards the man who is standing on the Western most side of the island. The man does not have any water to put out the fire, faces certain death if he jumps off the island, and cannot dig a hole into the hard surface. How does he survive ?
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Then you would made depend his survival in chance?… that’s not solving the problem. By the same token you can expect rain to happen in the right moment.
The thing that’s worries me is the reference to the 200m height of the island. Is there meaning to it? It might be there to enforce the hostility of the waters, their inaccessibility (to put out the fire), or is there another meaning? I don’t think we need to have sharks in the water to assure certain death if we jump on it from 200m high… it must more than enough to get near a terminal velocity of 200Km/h… can we resist a shock with water at 200km/h?
PS.: I’m don’t know why I was worried with the survival after my candidate solution… everything is going to burn anyway, whatever I do…
Who’s to say that the Island is covered in tree’s – maybe he could just stand in non-foresty bit?
I don’t know how he would survive once the fire has consumed everything but if I had the tools, I would had started a fire, say, at a midle point between the original front fire and the western coast. Then I would run behind that fire. For fire starter, I could use the the original fire, although that only has meaning if I could run faster than this one.