Puzzle Challenge: Can you tell when was the basket half-full?

New Delhi: Mathematics is fun and has a number of exciting games. The subject could have been boring for you in school but with brain-teasing puzzles, it is all about having fun. In the word problems posed in mathematics, people buy more than a dozen of fruits and other items, just to trick you. Here is another such problem which has an easy-to-find answer.

This is a story of a mathematician who is always thinking about maths and trying to find answers where ever there are numbers involved. Read the story and try to find the answer to the puzzle:

Story:

Mr Khatri is a good mathematician and he is always in a pensive mood. He is always thinking deeply about the numbers around him. One day, he was watching his wife Mala picking oranges. He went into his train of thought and created a puzzle. Mr Khatri noticed that the number of oranges in Mala’s basket doubled every minute, and it was full at precisely 12 o’clock noon.

Observing this, Mr Khatri posed a simple yet tricky question, can you solve it?

What do you need to answer?

Now you have heard the story and you know about Mr Khatri, so try and find the answer to his question-

He asked, “At what time was the basket half-full?”

Answer:

The basket was half-full exactly at 11:59 am.

Explanation:

Read the story carefully. It says that the number of oranges in Mala’s basket doubled every minute. So, if there ‘n’ number of oranges in Mala’s basket at 12 0’clock and the basket was full, so there were n/2 number of oranges at 11:59 am, which is half of the full basket.