Missing dollar

[FAT-TOY]

    Not exactly a technical problem but it is something that has worried me for years. 

   3 friends have to spend the night in a seedy hotel.  The room costs 30 bucks for the night, so they put in $10 each.  They find that the room has no air/con or heating and is not to clean so one of the blokes goes to the desk to complain.  The desk clerk agrees to give them a  better price, so he refunds $5.
   On the way back to the room he thinks to himself the $5 can’t be shared equally between 3 so he decides to give them back $1 each and puts the other $2 in drink machine and gets himself a coke.
    This means that they all paid $9 each for the room, which adds up to $27 combined this with the $2 that went into  the coke machine it comes to a  total $29

    What happened to the other $1 ?

                  Zane

[Nathan S]

The hotel has it. Sort of.

After the refund, but before the Coke is purchased, they've actually paid $8.33 each. ($25 total)

The Coke costs them $0.67 each ($9 each, $27 total).

They each get $1 back ($30 total), which accounts for the full $30.

The trick is in the last sentence. It should read:
"This means that they all paid $9 each for the room and the Coke, which adds up to $27 combined. This, with the $3 of refunds, comes to a total of $30".

The real lesson here, is that accountant should not be trusted...

[bishboy]

Ahh accountants can do anything with figures and being a banker/accountant I am partial to this one:

They have collectively paid 27 dollars for the room, since the coke drinker took $2 and the actual cost was $25. And so we see that there is no missing dollar, because the $27 the men paid is a debt, written as a negative number, and the $2 the coke drinker took is a profit, which is a positive number, and the sum is not $29, but a debt of $25, which was paid to the hotel.   Easy, I think   


Or the way I explain it to my kids:

If you give each of the $30 a number from 1-30 to keep track of each individual dollar. 
Dollars numbered 1-30 are given to the hotel and the desk gives $5 back, so the hotel keeps the dollars numbered 1-25, and gives numbers 26-30 to the coke drinker who then gives numbers 26, 27 and 28 to the himself and the two friends and uses numbers 29 and 30 to buy a coke.

[paco]

This is the arithmetic scott morisson and joe hockey uses

[SUZUKI311]

He has given the "others" $1 each, and then put in $2 to the drink machine, that equals $4 last time I looked. To get the correct formula he would need to give EACH person -not THE OTHERS- $1 each, and then put $2 in the drink machine.

[reg]

the dude that bought the coke has the dollar 

[Nathan S]

This is the arithmetic scott morisson and joe hockey uses

You win this thread.