Brainteasers

One :

1. A man encountered a bear in a wasteland. There was nobody else there. Both were frightened and ran away. The man ran to the north, the bear ran to the west. Suddenly the man stopped, aimed his gun directly to the south and shot the bear dead. What color was the bear?

2. Do they have a Fourth of July in England?

3. What is greater than God, More evil than the devil, The poor have it, The rich need it, And if you eat it, you will die?

4. Two friends are chatting:

- Peter, how old are your children?

- Well, Thomas, there are three of them, and when you multiply their ages together the total is 36.

- That is not enough information...

- The sum of their ages is exactly the number of beers we have drunk today.

- That is still not enough.

- OK, the last thing is that my oldest child wears a red hat.

How old were each of Peter's children? There can only be one answer.

Solutions

1. The bear had to be white, and had to be a polar bear, since the man ran north and stopped at the north pole and aimed his gun due south to hit the bear.

2. Yes, and a first, second, third….

3. Nothing

4. They are 2, 2, and 9. Let’s start with the known product, 36. Write on a sheet of paper the possible combinations giving the product of 36. Knowing that the sum is not enough to be sure, there are two possible combinations to get a product of 36,

1-6-6 and 2-2-9. And as we learned further that the oldest son wears a hat, it is clear that the correct combination of ages is 2-2-9, since there is only one of them that is the oldest.

Two:

1. Study this paragraph and all things in it. What is vitally wrong with it? Actually, nothing in it is wrong, but you must admit that it is most unusual. Don't just zip through it quickly, but study it scrupulously. With luck you should spot what is so particular about it and all words found in it. Can you say what it is? Tax your brains and try again. Don't miss a word or a symbol. It isn't all that difficult, now is it?

2. Some months have 30 days and some have 31 days. How many of them have 28 days.

3. Lee’s parents immigrated from China. They have five children. They named the first four, La, Li, Li, and Lo. What did they name the fifth child?

4. If there are five apples and you take away two, how many apples to you have.

Solutions

1. There are no “E’s” in the entire paragraph.

2. All of them have 28 days.

3. Lee. The name of the fifth child is stated in the first sentence of the question.

4. You now have two apples.

Three:

1. How much dirt is in a hole 4 feet deep and 24 inches across?

2. The 22nd and 24th Presidents of the USA have the same mother and the same father, yet they are not brothers. How can this be?

3. Round as an apple

Deep as a cup

Yet all the king’s horses can’t pull me up.

What am I?

4. Three wise men wanted to find out who was the wisest. So they invited the grand master, who took them into a dark room and said: "I will paint on each one of you a red or a blue dot on your forehead. When you walk out and you see at least one red dot, raise your hand. The one who says what color the dot is on his own forehead first, wins." Then he painted only red dots on each one of them. When they went out, everybody had their hands up and after a while wisest one of them said: "I have a red dot on my head." How could he be so sure?

Solutions

1. None. Holes are empty and have no dirt in them.

2. Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms as president. One beginning in 1885 and one in 1893.

3. A well

4. The wisest one must have thought like this:

I see all hands up and I see two red dots, so I can have either a blue or a red dot on my forehead. If I had a blue dot, the other two guys would see all hands up and they would see one red and one blue dot. If this were the case, then they would know that they had to have a red dot on their foreheads for all three hands to go up. However, they were both silent (and they are wise), therefore I could only have a red dot on my forehead.

Four:

1. What do you give a bald rabbit?

2. How do you make a slow horse fast?

3. Why did Sam wear a pair of pants with three large holes?

4. Let's say some E. coli divide themselves every minute in two equal parts that are each the same size as the original organism. The Petri dish in which we started observing this process was full at 12.00. When was it half full?

5. A smart microbiologist had a clock, which he had forgotten to wind up. He had no other clock, watch, radio, TV, phone or any other device telling the time. So when his clock stopped he went to a friend’s house, stayed there the whole night and when he came home, he knew the right time. How could he have known this?

6. How is the letter “G” like 12:00pm?

Solutions

1. A hare piece.

2. Stop feeding him.

3. So he could put them on – all pants have 3 large holes

4. The Petri dish was half full at 11:59 - the next minute there will be twice as many of them.

5. Clocks can measure time even when they do not show the right time. You just have to wind the clock up and...

We have to assume that the journey to the friend’s house and back lasts exactly the same

time, the friend has a clock that shows the correct time, and that the microbiologist’s clock is portable.

Now there is no problem to figure out the solution…right?

6. Two answers:

1. Because “G” is mid night,

2. Because they are both at the end of “morning”