To sharpen up your skills with the process of elimination, try this puzzle.
But remember, Roman wasn't built in a day!  (Do people still say that?)
Don't expect yourself to solve this puzzle right away.
What if Barney asked you to mix up some purple paint.  He might give
you a mixing bowl and a stir stick, and then some cans of paint.  He'd
start with red, then give you yellow, and orange and green.  Knowing Barney,
he'd probably want to sing a song before he got around to giving you the
blue paint.  If you tried to mix up some purple paint before getting the blue,
you'd probably end up with some interesting shades of brown and gray.
You might have a lot of fun (at least I hope you would), but you wouldn't
have purple-- not yet.  So as you do this next problem, see if you can't trust
that Barney will eventually whip up some magic blue paint.

 
 

A DAY IN MATH HEAVEN

One day, during Person Centered Math class, Augustus and his friends challenged their peers to solve their favorite math riddles. One of the four friends made up a geometry puzzle, another wrote a stimulating algebraic equation, another fascinated the class with a multiplication table, and the other got a standing ovation for doing square roots. From this information and the clues, can you determine the full name of all four friends (One of whose last name is Tyler)?

  1.   The second to present was a boy.
  2.   Lucy presented before Jones.
  3.   Agnes presented before the boy who got the standing ovation, who didn’t go last.
  4.   Curt and Jones are best friends.
  5.   Gonzalez presented just before the one who dazzled the class with geometry, who didn’t bring up the rear.
  6.   Although Johnson shares the class’s passion for algebra, that wasn’t the subject of Johnson’s         presentation and neither was geometry.
Presenter 1st 2nd 3rd 4th
First Name        
Last Name        
Type of Math        

If you get stuck, just give Barney a tap.