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Katya smiled. "You don't need a Reshebnik, Alyosha. You need a map." She sat down and drew two dots on his paper. "Think of it like this: every hour, the distance between them shrinks. They aren't rivals; they’re a team working together to close the gap."
Suddenly, the abstract numbers turned into a story. Alyosha saw the steam from the engines. He understood that their speeds added up. With a quick scribble, he divided the total distance by their combined speed.
"It’s No. 446," Alyosha sighed. "The 'Reshebnik' (solution guide) in my head is broken."
The problem wasn't just numbers; it was a riddle of logic. It asked about two trains—one carrying timber and one carrying bricks—speeding toward each other from different cities. Alyosha’s brow furrowed. He had filled three pages of his scratchpad with messy calculations, but the trains in his head kept crashing before they could ever meet at the right mathematical point.