What Comes Next?

RAY: Here's the answer. It's a big hint that there are nine numbers here.

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: If you went ahead and you spelled out the numbers, one, two, three, four, five, the number one has three letters, the number two has three letters, the number three has five letters.

TOM: Ohhh.

RAY: And the tenth term would be the number ten, which has --

TOM: Three letters.

RAY: And of course, the answer is three. Three is the next number in the sequence. So who's our winner?

TOM: Wow, I have to say, that stunk.

RAY: Well if you thought that was bad, wait until you hear this week's puzzler!

TOM: All right, well, we do have a winner. It's John Wince from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and for having his answer selected at random from among all the correct answers that we got, John is going to get a 26-dollar gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division at cartalk.com, where he can get the new Car Talk puzzler deck. It's a deck of 75 oversized cards, and each card contains one of our puzzlers.

RAY: One of our wonderful puzzlers, and the answers are on the other side of the cards?

TOM: Oh no. We sell the answers separately. It's the only way we can make any money on these things.

RAY: Exactly.

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]