Four jolly men sat down to play,
and played all night till break of day.
They played for gold and not for fun,
with separate scores for every one.
Yet when they came to square accounts,
they all had made quite fair amounts!
Can you the paradox explain?
If no one lost, how could all gain?
Two fathers and two sons went fishing one day. They were there the whole day and only caught 3 fish. One father said, that is enough for all of us, we will have one each. How can this be possible?
There was the father, his son, and his son's son. This equals 2 fathers and 2 sons for a total of 3!
Two sentries were on duty outside a barracks.
One faced up the road to watch for anyone approaching from the North.
The other looked down the road to see if anyone was approached from the South.
Suddenly one of them said to the other, "Why are you smiling?"
How did he know that his companion was smiling?
Although the guards were looking in opposite directions, they were not back to back. They were facing each other.
In a one storey brown house, there was a brown person with a brown computer, brown telephone, and brown chair. He also had a brown cat and a brown fish – Just about everything was brown – What colour was the stairs?
As it was a one-storey house – there were no stairs.
You are standing before two doors. One of the path leads to heaven and the other one leads to hell. There are two guardians, one by each door. You know one of them always tells the truth and the other always lies, but you don’t know who is the honest one and who is the liar. You can only ask one question to one of them in order to find the way to heaven. What is the question?
The question you should ask is "If I ask the other guard about which side leads to heaven, what would he answer?"
It should be fairly easy to see that irrespective of whom do you ask this question, you will always get an answer which leads to hell. So you can chose the other path to continue your journey to heaven.
This idea was famously used in the 1986 film Labyrinth.
Here is the explanation if it is yet not clear.
Let us assume that the left door leads to heaven.
If you ask the guard which speaks truth about which path leads to heaven, as he speaks always the truth, he would say "left". Now that the liar , when he is asked what "the other guard (truth teller) " would answer, he would definitely say "right".
Similarly, if you ask the liar about which path leads to heaven, he would say "right". As the truth teller speaks nothing but the truth, he would say "right" when he is asked what "the other guard( liar ) " would answer. So in any case, you would end up having the path to hell as an answer. So you can chose the other path as a way to heaven.
In the land of Brainopia, there are three races of people: Mikkos, who tell the truth all the time, Kikkos, who always tell lies, and Zikkos, who tell alternate false and true statements, in which the order is not known (i.e. true, false, true or false, true, false). When interviewing three Brainopians, a foreigner received the following statements:
Person 1:
I am a Mikko.
Person 2:
I am a Kikko.
Person 3:
a. They are both lying.
b. I am a Zikko.
Can you help the very confused foreigner determine who is who, assuming each person represents a different race?
Person 1 is a Miko.
Person 2 is a Ziko.
Person 3 is a Kikko.
I dig out tiny caves, and store gold and silver in them.
I also build bridges of silver and make crowns of gold.
They are the smallest you could imagine.
Sooner or later everybody needs my help,
yet many people are afraid to let me help them.
What am I?
On the first day of the school a young girl was found murdered. Police suspect four male teachers and question them. They were asked what they were doing at 8:00 am.
Mr. Walter: I was driving to school and I was late.
Mr. Thomas: I was checking English exam papers.
Mr. Benjamin: I was reading the newspaper.
Mr. Calvin: I was with my wife in my office.
The police arrested the killer. How did the police find the murderer?
Mr.Thomas as he cannot be checking exam papers on the first day of school.
One day a scholar came to the court of Emperor Akbar and challenged Birbal to answer his questions and thus prove that he was as clever as people said he was.
He asked Birbal: "Would you prefer to answer a hundred easy questions or just a single difficult one?"
Both the emperor and Birbal had had a difficult day and were impatient to leave.
"Ask me one difficult question," said Birbal.
"Well, then tell me," said the man, "which came first into the world, the chicken or the egg?"
"The chicken," replied Birbal, very confidently.
"How do you know?" asked the scholar, a note of triumph in his voice.
What did Birbal answer to this?
Birbal told the scholar, "We had agreed you would ask only one question and you have already asked it" and he and the emperor walked away leaving the scholar gaping.
As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives
The seven wives had seven sacks
The seven sacks had seven cats
The seven cats had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks and wives
How many were going to St. Ives?
One person is going to St. Ives (the narrator). Because the narrator "met" all of the others mentioned in the poem, this implies that they walked past each other in opposite directions, and thus none of the wives, sacks, cats, or kits was actually headed to St. Ives.
If you (like many) think this answer is a bit silly, you can assume that all the people, sacks, and animals mentioned were heading for St. Ives. In this case, we would have 1 narrator + 1 man + 7 wives + 49 sacks + 343 cats + 2401 kits = 2802 total going to St. Ives. However, this isn't the traditional answer.
