An equilateral triangle $A B C$ is divided into 100 congruent equilateral triangles. What is the greatest number of vertices of small triangles that can be chosen so that no two of them lie on a line that is parallel to any of the sides of the triangle $A B C$ ?
An example for 7 vertices is shown in Figure 2. Now assume we have chosen 8 vertices satisfying the conditions of the problem. Let the height of each small triangle be equal to 1 and denote by $a_{i}, b_{i}, c_{i}$ the distance of the $i$ th point from the three sides of the big triangle. For any $i=1,2, \ldots, 8$ we then have $a_{i}, b_{i}, c_{i} \geq 0$ and $a_{i}+b_{i}+c_{i}=10$. Thus, $\left(a_{1}+a_{2}+\cdots+a_{8}\right)+\left(b_{1}+b_{2}+\cdots+b_{8}\right)+\left(c_{1}+c_{2}+\cdots+c_{8}\right)=80$. On the other hand, each of the sums in the brackets is not less than $0+1+\cdots+7=28$, but $3 \cdot 28=84>80$, a contradiction.