October's Brain Teaser

Building Blocks
Question

Blocks

Color..................... Number of Blocks in Bag

Bag of Red Blocks ......407

Bag of Blue Blocks ......143

Bag of Green Blocks ....306

Bag of Yellow Blocks ....212

Ariel and Ling built a giant structure with plastic blocks.
They used 2 bags of the color with the most blocks in a bag.
They used 4 bags of the color with the fewest blocks in a bag.
They used 3 more bags of yellow blocks than bags of red blocks.
They used 3 bags of the remaining color.

How many blocks did they use in all?

September's Brain Teaser

Coin Catch

Mariah was cleaning out her purse and found a handful of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. She found 16 coins in all.

She had:
the same number of nickels as pennies.
$1.00 in quarters.
2 more dimes than quarters.

Use this information and the following U.S. coin values to answer the question below.
5 pennies = 5 cents, or 1 nickel
2 nickels = 10 cents, or 1 dime
5 nickels = 25 cents, or 1 quarter
4 quarters = 100 cents, or 1 dollar, written $1.00

How much money did she find in all?