I am the owner of a pet store. If I put in one canary per cage, I have one bird too many. If I put in two canaries per cage, I have one cage too many. How many cages and canaries do I have?
If you put one canary in each cage, you have an extra bird without a cage. However, if you put two canaries in each cage then you have two canaries in the first cage, two canaries in the second cage and an extra cage.
Pencil lead. While modern pencils don’t contain lead, that’s still what we call the graphite compound. When real lead was used in pencils it was mined and nearly everyone has used a pencil at some point in their life.
You are given eight coins and told that one of them is counterfeit. The counterfeit one is slightly heavier than the other seven. Otherwise, the coins look identical. Using a simple balance scale, how can you determine which coin is counterfeit using the scale only twice?
First weigh three coins against three others. If the weights are equal, weigh the remaining two against each other. The heavier one is the counterfeit. If one of the groups of three is heavier, weigh two of those coins against each other. If one is heavier, it’s the counterfeit. If they’re equal weight, the third coin is the counterfeit.
Think of the six-letter name of a European capital city whose starting letter falls in the last half dozen letters of the alphabet and whose last letter is a vowel.
Now think of a three-letter words that means “permit”.
Last, combine all nine letters from the two words above. Rearrange the letters to form a word that you might call someone you like.
Shawn and Kyle are bunk mates in prison and are desperate to escape. There is an unbarred window high above them, but the walls are smooth and it’s too high for them to reach even when standing on each other’s shoulders. Their cell has no furnishings other than a toilet and even when standing on the toilet and each other’s shoulders, they can’t reach the window.
They’ve tried digging through the dirt floor but the wall extends 50 feet below. How could escape through the window?
They could dig down with their hands, but it would take too long to dig 50 feet down. Instead, they could pile the dirt they dig up to give them enough height to reach the window. If they put the toilet seat down, they could pile the dirt on top, then get on each other’s shoulders to reach the window. That would mean only one of them would be able to get out. The remaining prisoner could either continue piling dirt to account for the missing guy or the escaped prisoner could come back with a rope to help his mate escape.
The moon. The moon has been around for quite some time, but there’s a “new” moon every month or so. A Blue moon is a rare event. The moon is a body of rock, so it’s never empty, but we do see what we call a full moon some nights. And the moon’s gravity “pulls” on the ocean to create low and high tides, but it doesn’t push anyone around because it’s a friendly fellah.
From a basket of mangoes when counted in twos there was one extra, counted in threes there were two extra, counted in fours there were three extra, counted in fives there were four extra, counted in sixes there were five extra, but counted in sevens there were no extras.
At least how many mangoes were there in the basket?
119. The number has to be evenly divisible by seven for there to be no extras when counting in sevens, and it has to be odd in order for there to be one extra when counting by twos. It also can’t be evenly divisible by three through six. 119 is the first odd multiple of 7 that satisfies the requirements.
