Problem 10 (The Five Houses)

You are given the following facts:

1. There are five houses of different colors.
2. In each house lives a person of a different nationality.
3. Each owner likes a certain beverage, has one pet, and likes a certain basketball team.
4. No two owners like the same beverage, have the same pet, or like the same team.

Hints:

1. The English person lives in a red house.
2. The Swedish person has a dog.
3. The Danish person drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The person who lives in the green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who likes the Knicks basketball team has a bird.
7. The owner of the yellow house likes the Celtics basketball team.
8. The person living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The person who likes the Lakers lives next to the person who has a cat.
11. The person who has a horse lives next to the person who likes the Celtics.
12. The owner who likes the Bulls basketball team drinks Coca Cola.
13. The German is a fan of the Pistons basketball team.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The person who likes the Lakers has a neighbor who drinks water.

The question is, which person has a fish ? (Guessing the right anwer won't give you any points.)

Solution

For problems like this, it always helps to organize things so one can see what is going on. Below, we have given the solution by specifying the five houses, the nationality of person in the house, the team favored by the person, the favorite beverage, and the household pet.

You can check yourself to see that all the hints of the problem are satisfied. The numbers indicate the order in which we filled in the words. For example, Hint 9 told us a Norwegian lived in the first house, which was the first blank we filled. Hint 14 told us the Norwegian lived next to a blue house, and hence we filled in the color BLUE in the second house. We then used other hints to fill in the colors of the houses. From then on it was pick and choose the hints so that all the blanks were filled.

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Last modified on Friday, February 12, 1999