A long time ago, an old man was living with his three sons in a deserted village, located in the vicinity of a desert. He earned for his life with his 17 camels.
He used to rent out camels as means of shipping in the desert. One day, he passed away and he had a will, leaving his assets for his three sons.
After all the funeral obligations, the three sons read the will. While he divided all the properties he had into three equal parts, he divided the 17 camels in a different way. It wasn’t shared equally among the three as ‘17’ is an odd number and prime number, which cannot be divided.
The deceased old man stated that the eldest son will own half of the 17 camels and the middle one will get the one third of the 17 camels and the youngest one will get his share of camel as one ninth!
All of them were stunned to read the will and questioned how to divide 17 camels as mentioned in the will.
It is neither possible to divide 17 camels and give the half of the 17 camels to the eldest one nor able to divide the camels to the other two sons. They spent several days to divide the camel as mentioned in the will, but none could find the answer.
They finally took this issue to the wise man in their village. The wise man, after giving some thought, brought one camel of his own and added the same to 17. That increased the total to 18 camels.
Now, he started reading the deceased father’s will.
Half of 18 = 9. So he gave the eldest son 9 camels.
1/3rd of 18 = 6. So he gave the middle son 6 camels.
1/9th of 18 = 2. So he gave the youngest son 2 camels.
Now add this up: 9 plus 6 plus 2 is 17,and this left one camel, which the wise man took away.
Moral Of The Story:
The wise man solved this problem smartly with this intelligence. Intelligence is nothing but finding a common ground to solve an issue. Every problem has a solution.
