In a family supper, a grandfather, a grandmother, two fathers, two mothers, four children, three grandchildren, one brother, two sisters, two sons, two daughters, one daughter-in-law, and one mother-in-law need to sit at a table.
There are only seven chairs available at the place. How many more chairs do they have to borrow so that everyone can sit down together for the suppers if everybody requires a separate chair?
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?
A man and his wife were doing missionary work near the city of Nairobi in the country of Kenya in eastern Africa. Their housing had not yet been completed, so the man, the woman, and their six year old daughter were spending a few nights in the jungle in three small pup tents. During their third night there, the woman was awakened by the call of a hyena passing by, so she got out of her tent to see if her young daughter had been frightened by the noise. As she peered into her daughter's tent she was surprised to see the dark figures of lion, a panther, and a cheetah which were curled up next to her daughter. Seeing her daughter was asleep and unharmed, the woman slowly and quietly withdrew from the tent, and simply returned to her own tent and went back to bed. How could this child's mother leave her daughter in such a dangerous situation, and simply ignore what she had just witnessed without intervening in some way? How can such emotional coldness ever be explained; or is there something here we are missing?
One fine day, an intellectual man came to the emperor's court with the aim of testing Birbal's wittiness. In order to do this, he challenged Birbal to answer his question and hence prove that he was as intelligent and witty as he was said to be.
He asked Birbal, Do you want me to ask one difficult question or a hundred easy ones?
Since both Akbar and Birbal had had a tough day and were eager to leave, Birbal hastily told the intellectual to ask him a single difficult question.
Intellectual: OK. Tell me what came first into the world, the egg or the chicken?
Of course, the chicken, Birbal replied with a smile.
This time with a note of victory in his voice, the intellectual asked Birbal, How will you demonstrate that?
What did Birbal say?
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.
