Today's Puzzle
Monday, December 7
In the bar chart shown at left, what word has been covered by a pink rectangle?
The "data" represented in the chart are admittedly subjective, and were made up by Dr. Shapiro (who is curious if you'd rank any of the items differently).
Hint
I thought about adding a column labeled "Anything 8 times", but it would have dwarfed all the other bars.
Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution
¿Cómo se llama la tercera parada de este viaje temático?
Hint
Estos son algunos de los animales locales. ¡Qué adorable!
Solution
Translating to English, the question is "What is the name of the third stop in this trip with a theme?"
The first, second, fourth, and fifth stops are Red Bluff, Orange County, Green Bay, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. So the answer ought to be something like Yellow... but hey, it's not for nothing that I asked the question in Spanish! That city in northern Texas is Amarillo, which is Spanish for "yellow".
If you couldn't read the Spanish, I hope some combination of geographic knowledge and the visual/auditory hints (rainbows! armadillos!) helped get you to the answer.
Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Maddy, Jacob C., Inca, Charlie, Yana, Graham, the Greggs, and Kate. Thanks to everybody who made a guess!
About This Site
Though he now teaches mathematics, Dr. (né Mr.) Shapiro's first job in a K–12 school was as a lunch monitor in Davis, CA. It was there that he originated the Puzzle of the Day, even rewarding correct answers with tickets in denominations like "15 points" (though without a clear idea of how he'd ultimately redeem these). Dr. Shapiro's favorite puzzle from this pre-professional era was "Tell me the location of the beehive on this campus."
Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.
Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March to November 2020.