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.
A pregnant woman is preparing to name her seventh child. Her children's names so far are Dominique, Regis, Michelle, Fawn, Sophie, and Lara. What will she name her next child -- Jessica, Katie, Abby or Tilly?
A thief is convicted in Mexico. He gets the death penalty. The judge allows him to say the last sentence to determine how the penalty will be carried out. If the thief lies, he will be hanged, if he speaks the truth he will be beheaded. The thief tells the last sentence and to everybody's surprise some minutes later he is set free because the judge cannot determine his penalty. What did the thief say?
I inserted a coin in a bottle and closed its mouth with the help of a cork. Now, I was able to take the coin out from the bottle without taking out the cork or breaking the bottle. Can you tell me how I did it?
A new clothing store has a unique method of pricing items. A vest costs $20, a tie costs $15, a blouse costs $30, and underwear costs $45. How much would pants cost?
In order to complete the racing competition, the Mexico racetrack has to submit its top and the most famous three horses to win the competition. Due to an electrical storm, all the records are cleared and no one knows which horse holds the record. They all look identical and it becomes even more difficult to differentiate the horses. There are 25 horses in the Mexico racetrack. But there can be only five horses at a time on the track. What will the least number of races that can be conducted to find out the three fastest horses?
In a science lab, a petri dish hosts a healthy colony of yeast for an experiment. Now every minute, all the yeast cells divide into two. At noon, there was just a single cell of yeast and at 1:22, the Petri dish was half full. Can you calculate when the dish will be full of yeast?
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.