How old is your son? asked a man to his neighbour. My son is five times as old as my daughter and my wife is five times as old as my son. I am twice as old as my wife whereas my grandmother, who is celebrating her eighty-first birthday is as old as all of us put together.
Its something that each of us devours,
Not just us but birds, beats, trees, and flowers,
Frets iron and nibbles steel,
Toil hard stones to meal,
Exterminates king, collapse town,
And blows the mountains down.
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?
These types of puzzles are known as charades. What you have to do is to find two words that are referred to in the first stanza and the second stanza and put them together to form the third word in the third stanza.
Just for example, if my first refers to 'off' and my second refers to 'ice', then my whole will be the 'office'.
My first is present - future's past -
A time in which your lot is cast.
My second is my first of space
Defining people's present place.
My whole describes a lack of site -
A place without length, breadth, or height.
In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.
