Customer Reviews

More Quizzles: Logic Problem Puzzles

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I teach math at the middle school level and getting students to read thoroughly and understand word problems is a challenge. More Quizzles and its predecessor Quizzles teach students to pick apart and examine the math hidden in language. There is a wide range of difficulty in puzzles, but with practice, even the most difficult are managable. I do find, however, that I must do the puzzle and understand it before I do it with the class; this avoids embarrassment on my part.

This book and its sequel, More Quizzles, are collections of logical deduction puzzles, an example of which is given below. Included is a clever graphical system which can be used to help in solving them. The book contains 38 problems of varying difficulty, all of them less-complicated than this example:

The question is, based on the following clues who owns the zebra?

There are five houses.

Each house has its own unique color.

All house owners are of different nationalities.

They all have different pets.

They all drink different drinks.

They all smoke different cigarettes.

The Englishman lives in the red house.

The Swede has a dog.

The Dane drinks tea.

The green house is on the left side of the white house.

In the green house they drink coffee.

The man who smokes Pall Mall has birds.

In the yellow house they smoke Dunhill.

In the middle house they drink milk.

The Norwegian lives in the first house.

The man who smokes Blend, lives in the house next to the house with cats.

In the house next to the house where they have a horse, the smoke Dunhill.

The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.

The German smokes Prince.

The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

They drink water in the house next to the house where they smoke Blend.

Who owns the Zebra?

Okay, so all I can say is that I must be some sort of a closet logic geek because I absolutely LOVE these puzzles! My advice is to buy the book, cut off the binding and make a copy and solve the copy because if you are even remotely like me you are going to have a hankerin' to do these puzzles again a few months down the road. Yep, I'm hooked!

Many of my math teachers in high school used to give these out as extra credit assignments or assignments to fill the time for students who finished tests early. I always looked forward to these puzzles as a student, so when I became a high school math teacher myself, I knew I had to start looking for this book as well as "Quizzles". It took me a while to find out the title (by Googling "logic puzzles") and even longer to find a new copy of the original "Quizzles" book [...].

After our first unit test this year, I gave each student one of the basic puzzles as an assignment and they fell in love. Now I have students asking me for them at least 2 or 3 times a week.

I recommend this book to any and all middle/high school math teachers who want to help students improve their logical reasoning (or anyone who enjoys logic puzzles) using a fun little game!

If you're looking for more of these kinds of puzzles, check out [...]. They have a few for free online, as well as a catalog of older books you can order.