Falling Window Cleaner

A window cleaner is cleaning a window on the 25th floor of a skyscraper when he slips and falls. He has no safety equipment and nothing to soften his fall, yet he is not hurt. How can this be?

He was cleaning the inside of the window.

Posted in Brain Teasers

Shuns the Light of Day

What must be in the oven yet can not be baked?
Grows in the heat yet shuns the light of day?
What sinks in water but rises with air?
Looks like skin but is fine as hair?

Yeast.

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Throw It Out To Use

What do you throw out to use and take in when you’re done?

An anchor.

Posted in Riddles

The Man in the Picture

A man is looking at a picture on the wall and says, “Brothers and sisters I have none, but this man’s father is my father’s son.”

What is their relationship?

The man in the picture is the onlooker’s son. Since he doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, the statement my father’s son can only be himself. A shortened version would be this man’s father is me, making him the father of the man in the picture.

Posted in Brain Teasers

The Bookworm

A bookworm eats from the first page of an encyclopedia to the last page in a straight line. The encyclopedia consists of ten 1000-page volumes and is sitting on a bookshelf in the usual order. Not counting covers, title pages, etc., how many pages does the bookworm eat through?

        __                             __
      B|  |                           |  |F
      A|1 |...........................|10|R
      C|  |                           |  |O
      K|  |                           |  |N
       |__|                           |__|T
      -------------------------------------

On a book shelf the first page of the first volume is on the “inside”, so the bookworm eats only through the cover of the first volume, then 8 times 1000 pages of Volumes 2 – 9, then through the cover to the 1st page of Vol 10 for a total of 8,000 pages.

Note: The question asks how many pages, not how many sheets of paper.

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Word Pronounced Incorrectly

What 11-letter word does everyone pronounce incorrectly?

The word “incorrectly”.

Posted in Riddles

Two Plus Two Equals Four

Each letter represents a different digit. Any digit can be used, but zero can never start a word. Given W = 2 and R = 6, what do the rest of the letters represent?

  TWO
+ TWO
------
 FOUR

F = 1
O = 8
R = 6
T = 9
U = 5
W = 2

  928
+ 928
-----
 1856
Posted in Brain Teasers

Sometimes I Enter With a Gong

I’m a word, six letters long,
I sometimes enter with a gong.

All in order from A to Z,
I start with the letter B.

What is the word?

Begins

It has six letters, when a meditation begins they sound the gong, and the letters are in alphabetical order.

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Characters In The Correct Order

Put the characters C D M L X in the correct order (not alphabetical).

X (10), L (50), C (100), D (500), M (1000). They’re Roman numerals in order from smallest to largest.

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Scrambled Auctioned

What are two other words (anagrams) that can be made from the letters in “auctioned”?

1. Cautioned
2. Education

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