You have two strings whose only known property is that when you light one end of either string it takes exactly one hour to burn. The rate at which the strings will burn is completely random and each string is different. How do you measure 45 minutes?

Today is a very icy and cold morning in Newcastle. Mr Shearer, an office bus driver arrived to pick up the employees from the last stop. Shearer suddenly remembers that he needs to pick a newly joined 4miles to the north. Mr Shearer lost his direction compass, a few minutes later Shearer is able to figure that he is moving in the correct direction i.e. north. How did Shearer know that he is moving in the correct direction?

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?

John left on a horse on Thursday , was gone for two days, and came back on Thursday after completing his work. How did that happen?

What is 3/7 chicken, 2/3 cat and 2/4 goat?

A police officer was passing by when he saw a guy hiding. He walked up to him and genially asked, "What is your name?"

"Shut up!" the boy responded.

"Where are your manners?" asked the outraged police officer.

"Up that tree," said the boy discourteously, directing to a neighbouring tree.

You're looking for trouble, aren't you?" said the police officer.

"No, trouble is looking for me!" the boy answered solemnly.

Why is the boy behaving like this?

In a competitive exam, each correct answer could win you 10 points and each wrong answer could lose you 5 points. You sat in the exam and answered all the 20 questions, which were given in the exam.
When you checked the result, you scored 125 marks on the test.

Can you calculate how many answers given by you were wrong?

When Jack was six years old he hammered a nail into his favourite tree to mark his height. Ten years later at age sixteen, Jack returned to see how much higher the nail was. If the tree grew by five centimetres each year, how much higher would the nail 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.

You are confined in a room and given two metal rods. Out of these two rods, one is magnet and the other is the iron rod. They look starkly similar. You don't have any other metal object in the room.

How will you decide which one of those is magnet?