A girl has as many brothers as sisters, but each brother has only half as many brothers as sisters. How many brothers and sisters are there in the family?
A boy and his father are caught in a traffic accident, and the father dies. Immediately the boy is rushed to a hospital, suffering from injuries. But the attending surgeon at the hospital, upon seeing the boy, says 'I cannot operate. This boy is my son.' How is this situation explained?
A frog is at the bottom of a 30-meter well. Each day he summons enough energy for one 3-meter leap up the well. Exhausted, he then hangs there for the rest of the day. At night, while he is asleep, he slips 2 meters backwards. How many days does it take him to escape from the well?
I can sizzle like bacon,
I am made with an egg,
I have plenty of backbone, but lack a good leg,
I peel layers like onions, but still remain whole,
I can be long, like a flagpole, yet fit in a hole.
An exterior architect is asked by a builder to plant seven trees in a manner that there are exactly six rows of trees in a straight line and each row has three trees in particular.
In the Wild West, you are challenged into a death match by two bounty hunters nicknamed Golden Revolver (GR) and Killer Boots (KB). You accept the challenge. None of you want to waste any of the bullet and so a certain rules are laid down:
1) All of you will shoot in a given order till the last man standing.
2) Each of you shoots only once upon his turn.
3) If any one of you is injured, the other two will finish him off with an iron rod.
4) The worst shooter of all (which is you) shoots first and the best one shoots at the last.
Now, how will you plan things if you know that you hit every third shot of yours, KB hits every second shot and GR hits every shot ?
In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.
