Riddles and Brain Teasers

Reading in the Dark

Jim and his wife Patty were sitting in bed together one evening while a thunderstorm raged outside. After a bolt of lightning followed by a loud clap of thunder, the lights went out. Jim stopped reading and went to sleep, but Patty continued reading in the dark. How did she do it?

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Patty is blind and was reading a Braille book so she didn’t need the light to begin with. Of course this also meant she didn’t know Jim snuck downstairs to get some cookies, but we’ll just keep that quiet.

Darkness

Posted in Brain Teasers

Shortest Word With All the Vowels

What is the shortest word in the English language to contain all of the vowels?

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Sequoia, eulogia or miaoued are all good options, but there’s an even shorter (and more obscure) word with all the vowels and not a single consonant: Iouea. It’s not the kind of word you’d use at the dinner table, but it’s listed in the Wikipedia dictionary as a genus of Cretaceous fossil sponges.If you got really tricky and tried to find a word that contained the letters in the phrase ‘all of the vowels’, you probably found, like I did, that there isn’t one. But it was still worth checking.

If you got really tricky and tried to find a word that contained the letters in the phrase ‘all of the vowels’, you probably found, like I did, that there isn’t one. But it was still worth checking.

Posted in Brain Teasers

Turns Everything Around

What turns everything around but doesn’t move?

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A mirror.

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A Mile From End To End

A mile from end to end, yet as close to as a friend. A precious commodity, freely given. Seen on the dead and on the living. Found on the rich, poor, short and tall, but shared among children most of all. What is it?

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A smile.

Posted in Riddles

An Iron Horse With A Flaxen Tail

An iron horse with a flaxen tail.
The faster the horse runs,
The shorter his tail becomes.

What is it?

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A needle and thread.

Posted in Riddles

All The Numbers of The Phone

What do you get when you multiply all of the numbers on a phone’s number pad?

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Zero.

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What Do You Serve?

What do you serve that a polite recipient would immediately send back?

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A ball, when you’re playing tennis, volleyball, table tennis, etc.

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Train From Chicago to LA

An electric train is traveling on a 2000-mile journey from Chicago, IL to Los Angeles, CA. It has 16 cars with a total of 320 passengers. The weather is cloudy and cool, with a warm front approaching from the south. Which direction will the steam blow?

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There is no steam. It’s an electric train.

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False Positive HIV Test

Imagine an HIV test that is 95% accurate (false positive rate of 5%) and around 2% of the tested population is infected with HIV. What is the probability that you actually have HIV when your test comes back positive?

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29%

To read more about this, see the False Positive Paradox page on Wikipedia.

Posted in Brain Teasers