What’s the most popular household pet? If you count up households, more families have dogs than anything else. But if you count animal by animal, cats and fish win, because it’s easy to have more than one. There are 72 million dog households, but 81 million cats and almost 76 million fish! Rabbits, turtles, and guinea pigs make the list, too, along with “livestock” like chickens and sheep. Wonder if anyone has one of each!
Wee ones: Who has the most legs, a flamingo, a fish or a dog?
Little kids: If you have 2 cats, 4 hamsters and a ferret, how many whiskery noses do they have? Bonus: If there are 20 houses on your street and all but 1 have a pet, how many homes have pets?
Big kids: 9 million homes have 76 million fish all together. If 8 million homes have just 1 fish, how many millions of fish are left for the rest? Bonus: 43 million houses have dogs, but just 37 million have cats. If 10 million houses in that whole set have both, how many have just 1 kind of pet?
The sky’s the limit: Say all the neighbors on your street have pet hamsters, turtles, and penguins. If the hamsters and turtles add up to 16, the turtles and penguins add up to 10, and the hamsters and penguins add up to 8, how many of each do you have?
Answers:
Wee ones: The dog, which has 4 legs.
Little kids: 7 noses. Bonus: 19 houses.
Big kids: 68 million fish. Bonus: 60 million homes (33 m dog homes and 27 m cat homes).
The sky’s the limit: 7 hamsters, 9 turtles, and 1 penguin. If you drop from 10 total to 8 total when you change from turtles-and-penguins to hamsters-and-penguins, there must be 2 more turtles than hamsters. They add up to 16, which means if the turtles dropped by 2, they’d be equal and add to 14. So there are 7 hamsters, which gives us 9 turtles. There are 10 pets when you add penguins to turtles, so there’s just 1 penguin.
