What word in the English language does the following: the first two letters signify a male, the first three letters signify a female, the first four letters signify a great man, the first six letters signify a drug, while the entire world signifies a great woman. What is the word?
It regulates our daily movements, but it feels no interest in our lives. It directs us when to come and go, but does not care if we pay attention. What is it?
A black dog stands in the middle of an intersection in a town painted black. None of the street lights are working due to a power failure caused by a storm. A car with two broken headlights drives towards the dog but turns in time to avoid hitting him. How could the driver have seen the dog in time?
You are standing next to three switches. You know these switches belong to three bulbs in a room behind a closed door – the door is tight closed, and heavy which means that it's absolutely impossible to see if any bulb is on or not. All three switches are now in position off.
You can do whatever you want with the switches and when you are finished you open the door and go into the room. While in there you have to tell which switch belongs to which bulb.
How will you do that?
Turn on the first switch and wait for a while.
Turn off the first one and turn on the second.
Go into the room.
One bulb is shining, the second bulb is hot and the third one nothing.
Jake and his friend Paco had very famous challenge sessions at their school. One would suggest something they could do, and the other would prove it wrong somehow.
One day, Jake surprised Paco by stating: "I can answer any question in the world."
Sure that he would win the challenge, Paco accepted the task of proving it wrong. He wrote up a test full of impossible questions. After a while, Jake returned the test. Paco unbelievably lost the challenge and told Jake he could indeed answer any question. How did Jake win?
For all the impossible questions, Jake simply wrote "I don't know".
One morning an airline president is leaving on a business trip and finds he left some paperwork at his office. He runs into his office to get it and the night watchman stops him and says, "Sir, don't get on the plane. I had a dream last night that the plane would crash and everyone would die!"
The man takes his word and cancels his trip. Sure enough, the plane crashes and everyone dies. The next morning the man gives the watchman a $1,000 reward for saving his life and then fires him.
Why did he fire the watchman that saved his life?
While mixing sand, gravel, and cement for the foundation of a house, a worker noticed a small bird hopping along the top of the foundation wall. The bird misjudged a hop and fell down one of the holes between the blocks. The bird was down too far for anyone to reach it and the hole was too small for it to fly out of. Someone suggested using two sticks to reach down into the hole and pull the bird out, but this idea was rejected for fear it would injure the fragile bird. What would be the easiest way to get the bird out of the hole without injuring it?
Since they had plenty of sand available, they could pour a little at a time into the hole. The bird would constantly keep shifting its position so that it stood on the rising sand.
A murdered is condemned to death.
He has to choose between three rooms.
The first is full of raging fires, the second is full of assassins with loaded guns, and the third is full of lions that haven't eaten in 3 years.
Which room is safest for him?
The third room. Lions that haven't eaten in three years are dead.
You overhear a man talking to a clerk in a hardware store. The clerk says "One will cost you 12 cents, ten will cost your 24 cents, and one hundred will cost you 36 cents."
What is the man buying?
The man is buying physical numbers to nail to the front of his house. Each number costs 12 cents, and so "1" will cost 12 cents, "10" will cost 24 cents, and "100" will cost 36 cents.
Bruce is an inmate at a large prison, and like most of the other prisoners, he smokes cigarettes. During his time in the prison, Bruce finds that if he has 3 cigarette butts, he can cram them together and turn them into 1 full cigarette. Whenever he smokes a cigarette, it turns into a cigarette butt.
One day, Bruce is in his cell talking to one of his cellmates, Steve.
"I really want to smoke 5 cigarettes today, but all I have are these 10 cigarette butts," Bruce tells Steve. "I'm not sure that will be enough."
"Why don't you borrow some of Tom's cigarette butts?" asks Steve, pointing over to a small pile of cigarette butts on the bed of their third cellmate, Tom, who is out for the day on a community service project.
"I can't," Bruce says. "Tom always counts exactly how many cigarette butts are in his pile, and he'd probably kill me if he noticed that I had taken any."
However, after thinking for a while, Bruce figures out a way that he can smoke 5 cigarettes without angering Tom. What is his plan?
Bruce takes 9 of his 10 cigarette butts and turns them into 3 cigarettes total (remember, 3 cigarette butts can be turned into 1 cigarette). He smokes all three of these, and now he has 4 cigarette butts.
He then turns 3 of the 4 cigarette butts into another cigarette and smokes it. He has now smoked 4 cigarettes and has 2 cigarette butts.
For the final step, he goes and borrows one of Tom's cigarette butts. With this cigarette butt plus the 2 he already has, he is able to make his 5th cigarette to smoke. After smoking it, he is left with 1 cigarette butt, which he puts back in Tom's pile so that Tom won't find anything missing.
