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A Puzzle Quandary

A Puzzle Quandary

I was working on a Cross Numbers puzzle this morning and encountered a step that I cannot resolve. I thought, “Who better to help me figure out if the book is wrong or I’m just being stupid than my fellow Tanganites?”

So here we go. A Cross Numbers puzzle looks like a Crossword except that all the answers are numbers and all the clues are math problems. Ok, so I just lost half of you. The rest – hope you’ll stick with me. The math problems are usually related to other answers. In other words, 1A (1 across) might say it is the remainder of 3D (3 down) divided by 34A. It is often hard to find a place to get started.

Well, I got started and had “504” as the answer to 6D. I confirmed in the solution that this number is correct. 25A says that it is “the product of the next 3 numbers after those in 6D”. I wasn’t sure what that meant – since it said “those in 6D”, I thought it maybe meant the digits. Three digits: 5-0-4, the next 3 would be 6-1-5, multiplying them together gives you 30. But, whoa! 25A has 4 blocks. Obviously, they can’t mean 505, 506, 507 because that’s a huge number.

Eventually, I looked at the solution to see if I could reverse engineer my way to the number they expected. The number is 1320. 1320 factors down to 2×2×2x3x5×11. Possible groups of 3 numbers that could multiply to 1320 are:

6,11,20
8,11,15
4,11,30
10,11,12 – aha! 3 consecutive numbers, at least!

Well, the list is longer, but it seems like maybe 10×11×12 is the intended answer since it would seem the numbers should be consecutive. This would seem to indicate that 25A was supposed to say “the product of the next 3 numbers after the sum of those in 6D”.

Can anyone find any other way for 1320 to be the right answer that doesn’t involve changing the wording of the clue?

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