How can you make the following equation true by drawing only one straight line: 5+5+5=550 ?
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?
How many times can you subtract the number two from the number fifty?
You order chicken wings at KFC in the boxes of 6, 9 and 20. What is the largest number of wings that you cannot obtain by buying in any combination of the boxes?
John asked Jack, "The time right now is 7 pm. Can you tell me what will be the time 23, 999, 995 hours later ?"
While Bella does not know the answer, do you ?
You have 10 balls with you. A friend of yours out of nowhere asks you to place those ten balls in five lines such that each of the lines has exactly 4 balls on them. He needs to check your intelligence. Prove him by doing the task.
How many sides does a circle have?
What is the value of 1/2 of 2/3 of 3/4 of 4/5 of 5/6 of 6/7 of 7/8 of 8/9 of 9/10 of 1000?
Our product and our sum always give the same answer. Who are we?
Alex is stranded on an island covered in forest.
One day, when the wind is blowing from the west, lightning strikes the west end of the island and sets fire to the forest. The fire is very violent, burning everything in its path, and without intervention the fire will burn the whole island, killing the man in the process.
There are cliffs around the island, so he cannot jump off.
How can the Alex survive the fire? (There are no buckets or any other means to put out the fire)
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.
