[Secret Agent Man]

Actually there are 2 correct answers to the third question, because they didn’t word it explicitly enough.

47 days is one answer. 1 day is also a correct answer.

[sparklite2]

True. Your IQ is double plus good.

[Yo-Yo]

Actually there are 2 correct answers to the third question, because they didn’t word it explicitly enough.

47 days is one answer. 1 day is also a correct answer.

I disagree. If it takes 48 days to cover the lake, and the lilly pads double every day, then 1/2 of the lake is covered on day 47, 1/4 on day 46, 1/8 on day 45, etc.

How do you get 1 day as an answer to the question "how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?"

[dr_lew]

Yeah, they didn’t define a day 0. What would be a grammatically innocuous way to do this?

... how about:

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. If the patch doubles in size every day, and it will take 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how many days will it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

... but that almost makes it too easy!

[Syllojism]

Actually there are 2 correct answers to the third question, because they didn’t word it explicitly enough.

47 days is one answer. 1 day is also a correct answer.

Seems explicit enough to me. It says it takes 48 days to cover the lake, not merely that it will be covering the lake after 48 days.

[Lower55]

It’s 47, because the question said “the Patch”, and it took 47 days for the patch to cover half the lake. 1 day to cover the rest. IMHO

[William Tell]

Secret Agent Man said: "1 day is also a correct answer."

Great. I think either I scored just 2.5 out of 3 or you scored 4 out of 3.