iNTELLIGENCE

IQ solution to: Two Flies

Each fly has crawled 105 cm.

This can be seen when the column surface is uncoiled, as seen in the figure above. The short site is the circumference (48 cm), the long site is equivalent to the height (126 cm). The height gives place to 3.5 windings of the stripe, or 126 : 3.5 = 36 cm per winding.

The golden border is the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle with the legs of 36 cm and 48 cm, respectively. Using Pythagoras' theorem, the length of the hypotenuse is 60 cm. Hence, the length of the golden (and also the silver) border is 60 cm × 3.5 = 210 cm. Half of this length is the distance that each fly has crawled, which then have the same distance from the ground (they arrive at the points x₁ and y₁).

Gimme more intelligence!