A merchant has 21 sacks of grain: 7 full, 7 half-full and 7 empty. He wants to divide them equally among his three sons. How can he do this, without transferring any grain between sacks, so each son has the same quantity of grain and number of sacks?
Wallace died a wealthy, if somewhat odd, man without any living relatives. He left his money in four different cities for the first four people who could find it. The only clue he left was this poem:
Do not go solo, Pairs up with a friend, Though I hasten to add, I’ll avenge my end.
A completely black dog was strolling down main street during a total blackout affecting the entire town. Not a single streetlight had been on for hours. As the dog crosses the center of the road a Buick Skylark with two broken headlights speeds towards it, but manages to swerve out of the way just in time. How could the driver see the dog to swerve in time?
A shoe. It has a tongue, a throat, eyes (or eyelets) and a sole. I used soul here or else it would have given the answer away, but this riddle works best when told rather than read. And as the joke goes, old shoes never die, they just lose their sole.
Joe and Andrea want to copy three 60-minute cassette tapes. They have a 2-cassette recorder to copy the tapes, allowing them to copy two tapes at a time. Each side takes 30 minutes to be copied, so two tapes can be copied in an hour and the third will take another hour. Andrea bets Joe she can copy all three tapes in 90 minutes. Does she win the bet?
In the first 30 minutes Andrea copies the A sides of tape 1 and 2. In the second 30 minutes, she copies tape 1 side B and tape 3 side A (finishing Tape 1). In the last 30 minutes, she copies tape 2 side B and tape 3 side B.
A fish. A fish bowl or aquarium is the fish’s house and the people inside are the decorative divers that offer no reply (one might ask how the fish knows, given that they aren’t a talkative bunch themselves).