You are a pyramid construction manager in ancient Egypt. One of your chores is to move the great stone blocks from the quarries to the building site, hundreds of leagues away. Unfortunately, due to a strike by the flying saucer pilot's union, the blocks cannot be transported as usual.
You hit upon the bright idea of rolling the blocks on large wooden rollers. Each of your rollers has a circumference of two cubits.
For each revolution of the rollers, how far does the block move?
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The Answer:
The block moves about four cubits, or a little over two yards. If you were thrown off by this deceptively simple problem, you probably forgot that while a point on the circumference of the roller moves two cubits relative to a point on the ground per rotation, that point on the roller also moves two cubits relative to a point on the block.
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