Two friends were stuck in a cottage. They had nothing to do and thus they started playing cards. Suddenly the power went off and Friend 1 inverted the position of 15 cards in the normal deck of 52 cards and shuffled it. Now he asked Friend 2 to divide the cards into two piles (need not be equal) with equal number of cards facing up. The room was quite dark and Friend 2 could not see the cards. He thinks for a while and then divides the cards in two piles.
On checking, the count of cards facing up is same in both the piles. How could Friend 2 have done it ?
You stand in front of two doors. A guard stands next to each door. You know the following things: one path leads to paradise, the other leads to death. You cannot distinguish between the two doors. You also know that one of the two guards always tells the truth and the other always lies. You have permission to ask one guard one question to discover which door leads to paradise. What one question would you ask to guarantee you enter the door to paradise?
You are a cab driver who pools passengers. You pick 3 people from a destination and drop 1 after an hour. 2 people climb aboard at the same time and you drop 3 at the next destination. After some time, you pick 2 passengers only to drop 1 after a short distance where 3 more passengers climb up the cab. You leave the rest of the passengers one by one to their destination and then come back home.
A spaceship was lost. The detective was given a piece of paper. This was the location of the spaceship! This is what the slip had scribbled on it:
Juice, Umbrella, Potato, Ice, Tomato, Elephant, Rice.
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.