What word begins and ends with an E, but has only one letter?

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?

In a particular village, only two barbershops exist.

The first shop has a handsome barber with a neat haircut who is handsomely dressed in clean clothes and is extremely humble with his body language. The place is clean and looks hygienic.

In the second shop, you can find a barber with shabby clothing. His hairs are weirdly cut and his clothes still have the stains from last night's dinner. The place is not clean as well and reeks a bit.

You visit the village for the first time and decide to get your haircut. Which barbershop will you like to go for that and why?

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.

A research team went to a village somewhere between the jungles of Africa. Luckily for them, they reached the day when quite an interesting custom was to be performed. The custom was performed once a year as they confirmed and was performed in order to collect the taxes from every male of the region.

The taxes were to be paid in the form of grains. Everyone must pay pounds of grain equaling his respective age. This means a 20-year-old will have to pay 20 pounds of grain and a 30-year-old will pay 30 pounds of grain and so on.

The chief who collects the tax has 7 weights and a large 2-pan scale to weigh. But there is another custom that the chief can weigh only three of the seven weights.

Can you find out the weights of the seven weights? Also, what is the maximum age of the man that can be weighed for the payment of taxes?

As shown in the image, the nine Dogs are square fenced. By constructing just two square fences can you make sure that two Dogs cannot meet each other without crossing the fence?

A mile-long train is moving at sixty miles an hour when it reaches a mile-long tunnel. How long does it take the entire train to pass through the tunnel?

What does it mean?

A thief enters a store and threatens the clerk, forcing her to open the safe. The clerk says, “The code for the safe is different every day, and if you hurt me you’ll never get the code.” But the thief manages to guess the code on his own. How did he do it?

A couple went on a climbing trip. But only the husband returned from the vacation and said that his wife slipped off while climbing and died. On investigating, the local sheriff arrested him saying, 'Your travel agent called. You murdered your wife.'

The man did not inform anyone about the trip. Then how was the agent so sure that it was a murder?