Another Handshake Problem

[Clueless Morgan]

We are not told whether Mrs. D shook hands with each of her guests.

Um... that's the question that needs to be solved:

With how many people did Mrs Delepine shake hands with?

If you state in the initial problem that Mrs. D shook everyone's hand, then you've answered the riddle immediately after asking everyone to solve it, thus fulfilling my query of whether it's some kind of trick question.

She may have shaken hands only with the males, only with the females, all of them, or any other number.  From the way the question is worded, she could have shaken hands with Mr. B and Mrs. C and no one else.

With whom Mrs. D shakes hands is immaterial to the solution of the problem.  You could say that Couple A were the 5/0 handshakes couple, or that Couple C were, it doesn't make a difference to how many hands Mrs. D shook.  The OP doesn't ask "How many hands did Mrs. D shake, and whose were they?" it just asks for the number of hands shaken by Mrs. D.

For example:


Whether C1-m and C1-f (Couple 1, male and female) are Mr. and Mrs. Anderson or Mr. and Mrs. Carvalho doesn't matter to the answer (how many hands did Mrs. D shake?).  Likewise, you could swap the genders of each couple in this chart so that Mrs. D is shaking the hands of C1-m, C2-m and C3-f, it doesn't matter.  What matters is that one couple shakes 0/5 hands, one shakes 1/4 hands, one shakes 2/3 hands, and Mrs. D shakes the hand of one person from each couple in order that each of the guests shakes a different number of hands than anyone else (which is where I went wrong in my previous post - always make the chart when doing logic problems )