Assume there are approximately 5,000,000,000 (5 billion) people on Earth. What would you estimate to be the result, if you multiply together the number of fingers on every person's left hand? (For the purposes of this exercise, thumbs count as fingers, for five fingers per hand.) If you cannot estimate the number then try to guess how long the number would be.
Only one color, but not one size,
Stuck at the bottom, yet easily flies.
Present in sun, but not in rain,
Doing no harm, and feeling no pain.
What is it?
A man lives on the fifteenth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator, or if it was raining that day, he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the tenth floor and walks up five flights of stairs to his apartment. Can you explain why he does this?
A dying old man wants to divide his entire land between his only two sons. Since his only wish is to treat them as equal as both of them have been too good to him, he wants to divide his land equally between them. The problem is that the land is significantly irregular in shape and thus there is no choice of cutting them into two equal halves.
Can you help him divide the land in a manner that both of his sons will be happy?
A small town is visited by an ice-cream truck every day. On the first day of February, the truck visits as usual and 5 children, one from each of the first 5 houses on the street buys an ice cream that is of the different flavor from each other along with a completely different topping.
Go through the details below and find out which child lives in which house and bought which ice-cream flavor with which topping:
1. Jim lives between the child who bought the Raspberry topping and the child who bought mango ice cream.
2. Joyce, whose house has an even number, bought the cherry topping. Nancy does not live next to Joyce.
3. The blackcurrant ice cream had no topping.
4. The child who lives in house number 2 had the butterscotch ice cream. The child in house number 3 did not have chocolate ice cream.
5. Mike had banana ice cream. He hates banana cherry.
6. The child who had the cashew topping lives in house number 5. Dustin does not live in house number 4.
Please note that the odd numbered houses and the even numbered houses are located on the exactly opposite sides of the street.
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.
