Birbal was jester, counsellor, and fool to the great Moghul emperor, Akbar.
The villagers loved to talk of Birbal's wisdom and cleverness,
and the emperor loved to try to outsmart him.
One day Akbar (emperor) drew a line across the floor.
"Birbal," he ordered, "you must make this line shorter, but you cannot erase any bit of it."
Everyone present thought the emperor had finally outsmarted Birbal.
It was clearly an impossible task.
Yet within moments the emperor and everyone else present had to agree that Birbal had made the line shorter without erasing any of it.
How could this be?
There was once a college that offered a class on probability applied to the real world. The class was relatively easy, but there was a catch. There were no homework assignments or tests, but there was a final exam that would have only one question on it. When everyone received the test paper it was a blank sheet of paper with a solitary question on it: 'What is the risk?'.Most students were able to pass, but only one student received 100% for the class! Even stranger was that he only wrote down one word!
What did he write?