A chess tournament is taking place on knock-out terms (the one who loses the match is out of the game).
(a) If 10 matches are played in total, how many players participated?
(b) If 20 players took part in the tournament, how many matches were played?
A car is crossing a 20 km-long bridge. The bridge can support at most 1500kg of weight over it. If somehow, the weight on the bridge becomes more than that, it will break.
Now, the weight of the car is exactly 1500kg. At the midway, a bird comes and sits on the roof of the car. This bird weighs exactly 200 grams.
Can you tell if the bridge breaks at this point or not?
James Bond is caught up in a mysterious scenario where the evil villain has him blindfolded. He somehow breaks through the handcuffs but is unable to get the blindfold off. Upon searching, he comes across a bow and 3 arrows. He can hear the villain speak, and thus tries to take a shot at him. He launches the first arrow, it misses the villain. He then launches the second arrow and it misses by a greater margin.
What is the probability that this third shot our James bond takes will be worse than the second shot?
There are two dice with empty faces in front of you and a marker. You can mark any number on each of the faces of the two dice, but you have to display all 31 days of the month using the two of them.
Which numbers will you mark on which dice so that you can easily depict all the dates of the month?
If we tie a Sheep to one peg, a circled grass is been eaten by the Sheep. If we tie the Sheep to two pegs with a circle on its neck, then an eclipse is eaten out of the grass by the Sheep. If we want an eclipse then we put two pegs and then put a rope in between them and the other end of the rope is tied up on the Sheep's neck.
How should we tie the peg and the Sheep so that a square is eaten out from the garden grass? We only have one Sheep rope and the peg and the rings.
A swan sits at the center of a perfectly circular lake. At an edge of the lake stands a ravenous monster waiting to devour the swan. The monster can not enter the water, but it will run around the circumference of the lake to try to catch the swan as soon as it reaches the shore. The monster moves at 4 times the speed of the swan, and it will always move in the direction along the shore that brings it closer to the swan the quickest. Both the swan and the the monster can change directions in an instant.
The swan knows that if it can reach the lake's shore without the monster right on top of it, it can instantly escape into the surrounding forest.
The day before the 1996 U.S. presidential election, the NYT Crossword contained the clue “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper,” the puzzle was built so that both electoral outcomes were correct answers, requiring 7 other clues to have dual responses.