You have a fox, a chicken and a sack of grain. You must cross a river with only one of them at a time. If you leave the fox with the chicken he will eat it; if you leave the chicken with the grain he will eat it. How can you get all three across safely?
Take the chicken over first. Go back and bring the grain next, but instead of leaving the chicken with the grain, come back with the chicken. Leave the chicken on the first side and take the fox with you. Leave it on the other side with the grain. Finally, go back over and get the chicken and bring it over.
There is one word that stands the test of time and holds fast to the center of everything. Though everyone will try at least once in their life to move around this word, but in fact, unknowingly, they use it every moment of the day. Young or old, awake or in sleep, human or animal, this word stands fast. It belongs to everyone, to all living things, but no one can master it. The word is?
Thanks to the comments, it doesn’t mean anything per se, but it’s a location in Zambia. If that’s all it is, it’s not really a brain teaser, but since we’ve already worked on it, I’m marking it as solved leaving it up for posterity.
Below are former attempts to solve it.
I have yet to figure this one out. NDOLA could mean And lo, or An old, among other things. Pamodzi on the other hand didn’t have any particularly meaningful anagrams. Both words together had over 1,000 anagrams.
I haven’t come up with any other possible meanings.
The tree is in the middle of the road as measured by length, not in the middle of it by width. In other words, the tree is growing on the side of the road, but it is equidistant from either end of the road, and therefore in the middle.
This makes it quite easy to pass the tree as you just drive on the road, unless you’re texting and you run into said tree. If this is the case, stop texting.
A shark. Sharks experience tonic immobility, also known as apparent death, where they appear to have died. Blood does not easily flow through their bodies, forcing sharks to swim continuously to circulate their blood. Lastly, sharks have pet fish called Remora (sometimes called suckerfish). They feed on parasites on the sharks and leftovers, and they use the shark as transport and protection.
When Julian and Penelope met, one was half the others age plus seven years. Ten years later when they married, Penelope was thirty, but this time one was nine tenths the age of the other. How old was Julian? (No fractions or partial years, whole numbers only).
You’re standing 11 feet away from a doorway and with each step you move halfway to the doorway. How many steps will it take for you to get to the doorway?
Technically, the answer is infinity. If you keep going halfway, you’ll never actually make it to the doorway.
But in practice, after 10 steps you’ll be 1/8th of an inch to the doorway and anyone behind you would say to stop being a baby and take a real step through the doorway already.