Fred brings home 100 pounds of potatoes, which (being purely mathematical potatoes) consist of 99 percent water. He then leaves them outside overnight so that they consist of 98 percent water. What is their new weight?
100 lb of potatoes with 99% water weight means there’s 99 lb of water and 1 lb of solids, a 1:99 ratio.
If the water decreases to 98%, then the solids account for 2% of the weight. The 2:98 ratio reduces to 1:49. Since the solids still weigh 1 lb, the water must weigh 49 lb for a total of 50 lbs for the answer.
He and she both have one each, but every person has two. A citizen has three and a human being has four. A personality has five and an inhabitant of earth has six. What are they?
A necessity to some, a treasure to many,
I’m best enjoyed among pleasant company.
Some like me hot, some like me cold.
Some prefer mild, some like me bold.
What is the longest unscientific English word that uses every letter in the word exactly twice? For example, noon has two Ns and two Os, but it’s not nearly long enough.
Happenchance. There are two Hs, two As, and so on for all the letters in the word. The longest scientific word with the same property is probably esophagographers.
What looks like food, tastes like food, smells like food, sounds like food when you cook it, is grown in dirt like food, fills up your stomach like food, but is not food?
A poisonous mushroom. Since some types of mushrooms are edible, it can be very hard to distinguish between a safe mushroom and one that will kill you. Food is defined as a substance consumed to provide nutrition, therefore a poisonous mushroom that kills you doesn’t qualify as food, even though it shares all of the traits of a regular mushroom.
Other valid answers include anything that’s edible, resembles food, but is poisonous.
By setting the snooze time to 9 minutes, the alarm clock only needs to watch the last digit of the time. So, if you hit snooze at 6.45, the alarm goes off again when the last digit equals 4. They couldn’t make it 10 minutes, otherwise the alarm would go off right away, or it would take more circuitry.