Brain Teasers
Thanksgiving Birthday
Tom was born on Thanksgiving Day.
On his seventh birthday, he noticed that Thanksgiving had never fallen on
his birthday. How old will he be when he finally has a Thanksgiving birthday?
Solution:
11.
Start
by considering a specific example. Let’s say that Thanksgiving falls on
November 26 in a given year. If the next year is a non‑leap year,
Thanksgiving will fall on November 25. If the next year is a leap year,
Thanksgiving will fall on November 24. Said another way, if
November 26 is a Thursday in a given year, then November 26 will be
Friday the following year (if it’s a non‑leap year) or Saturday (if it’s a leap
year).
There are three things you need to know:
- Thanksgiving is always on
a Thursday (the fourth Thursday in November, in fact).
- In a nonleap year, the
calendar shifts by one day from one year to the next, because there are
seven days in a week, and 365 has a remainder of 1 when divided by 7.
- In a leap year, there is a
two-day shift, because 366 has a remainder of 2 when divided
by 7.
Suppose that Tom were born on Thanksgiving Day in the
year 2000. His first Thanksgiving birthday would be his sixth birthday,
because by 2006 the calendar would have shifted one day per year plus a second
day during the leap year of 2004, for a total shift of seven days, which
is exactly a week.
We don’t know the year in which Tom was born, but we don’t
have to. If he was born in a leap year, he’d have a Thanksgiving birthday at
age 6, and that apparently didn’t happen. If he was born the year after a
leap year, as in 2001, he’d also have a Thanksgiving birthday at
age 6, for the same reasons as above. If he was born the year before a
leap year, as in 2003, he’d have a Thanksgiving birthday at age 5, because
by then the calendar would have shifted 7 days—one for each of his five
birthdays and two for the leap years at age 1 (in 2004) and 5
(in 2008).
Therefore, Tom must have been born midway through the leap
year cycle. The days of his birthdays look like this:
AGE
|
DAY OF BIRTHDAY
|
1
|
Friday
|
2
|
Sunday (leap-year
double-skip)
|
3
|
Monday
|
4
|
Tuesday
|
5
|
Wednesday
|
6
|
Friday (another
leap-year double-skip)
|
7
|
Saturday
|
8
|
Sunday
|
9
|
Monday
|
10
|
Wednesday (one more
leap-year double-skip)
|
11
|
Thursday
|
In general, Tom will celebrate a Thanksgiving birthday
according to an 11-6-5-6 pattern, meaning his eleventh, seventeeth, twenty‑second
and twenty-eighth birthdays will fall on Thanksgiving, at which point the cycle
starts over again.
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