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?
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.
In the given picture, you can find two letters missing. When two particular letters are placed in the missing spots, you get an eight-letter word while reading in the anti-clockwise direction. Can you find out the missing letters and the missing word eventually?
Andrew’s doctor gives him three pills and tells him to take one every half hour. How much time will have passed by the time Andrew’s taken all three pills?
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.