Solution: 5
Monday, 02 May 2011 22:07

Let's concentrate on the words first. There is the same number (13) of words in upper case and in lower case and there seems to be some link between them. The association is "is followed by / results in". The correct pairing is sun-TAN, love-SEX, ape-HUMAN, smoke-FIRE, egg-CHICKEN, luck-JACKPOT, winter-SPRING, thursday-FRIDAY, crime-PUNISHMENT, school-UNIVERSITY, childhood-MATURITY, and preparation-SUCCESS. The only illogical pair is lengthiest-CONCLUSIVE, which is also the only pair made of adjectives instead of nouns.

There are many letters in the puzzle; some of them are definitely mirrored as they can't be rotated on each other (Gs and Rs, for example). Why don't we find the mirroring axes, then? Each pair of words defines one axis. If we fold the paper along an axis, we can see that there is always exactly one letter which is projected on itself. Therefore, we can associate a letter with each pair of words.

The last step is to properly order the letters. The hint says "lengthiest-CONCLUSIVE", meaning the longest pair comes the last.So K (sun-TAN) is the first and H (lengthiest-CONCLUSIVE) is the last. We get KOHLWEG CHURCH.