Five hundred begins it, five hundred ends it, Five in the middle is seen; First of all figures, the first of all letters, Take up their stations between. Join all together, and then you will bring Before you the name of an eminent king.
The first two letters of this English word refer to a male, the first three refer to a female, the first four to a great man and the whole word is a great woman.
You have fifty quarters on the table in front of you. You are blindfolded and cannot discern whether a coin is heads up or tails up by feeling it. You are told that x coins are heads up, where 0 < x < 50. You are asked to separate the coins into two piles in such a way that the number of heads up coins in both piles is the same at the end. You may flip any coin over as many times as you want.
Kevin brings his school supplies to the counter. The cashier rings up his purchase for a total of $1.70. Kevin is puzzled, and says, “I bought 2 pencils at 2 cents each, 5 pencils at 4 cents each and 8 notebooks and 12 sheets of colored paper. I don’t remember the prices of the latter two, but the total can’t be $1.70.”
This problem can be solved by preschool children in five to ten minutes, by programmers in an hour and by people with higher education…well, check it yourself.
The man is playing monopoly, and landed on the Go To Jail space. An alternative version of this is, “A man stops his car in front of a hotel and immediately knows he is bankrupt.” The answer is the same, that he’s playing Monopoly, but this time he landed on a space with a hotel and didn’t have enough money to pay the bill.