There are four people in a house. A fireman, an athlete, an old woman, and a drunk guy. The house catches fire and before the fact is known, it is too late. All they know is that the entire house is in flames and it will collapse exactly after twelve minutes. Now they can move out of the house but for that, they will have to pass the hallway which is entirely blazing with flames. Thus to move, one must carry a fire extinguisher to keep the flames away. Seeking the burnt wooden floor, only two people can run through that hallway at one time. But for others to go, one must return back with the fire extinguisher. The fireman is trained for such tasks and can run through the hallway in a minute. The athlete can make it in a couple of minutes. The old woman can run slowly and will cover the hallway in four minutes. The drunk guy will take five minutes to run through it. If all of them can make it through the hallway in twelve minutes, all of them will be saved. When two move together, they will run at the speed of the slower ones.

How will all four of them manage to run to safety?

What has hands, but can’t clap?

Most people think of me as money. But when they find me in the water, they won’t get any money out of me. What am I?

It's a protector.
It sits on a bridge.
One individual can see directly through it, while others wonder what it hides.

What is it?

Can you count the number of quadrilaterals in the picture below?

John is on an island and there are three crates of fruit that have washed up in front of him. One crate contains only apples. One crate contains only oranges. The other crate contains both apples and oranges.

Each crate is labelled. One reads 'apples', one reads 'oranges', and one reads 'apples and oranges'. He know that NONE of the crates have been labeled correctly - they are all wrong.

If he can only take out and look at just one of the pieces of fruit from just one of the crates, how can he label all of the crates correctly?

_ _ _ IE _ _
_ _ _ IE _
_ _ IE _ _
_ _ IE _
_ _ _ _ IE

Like you see, some letters have gone missing from these words that contain the IE pair at some or the other place. The letters that will be used to fill the blanks are given below. Use them and form meaningful words. Can you do that?

A, C, D, F, H, K, L, M, N, N, O, R, R, S, S, S, T, T, Y and Y.

A man is surviving on an island along with his friend. They have been starving for four days for food. Suddenly, they find a fisherman. The friend goes with the fisherman in order to catch the fish (if they can find any).

The fisherman returns after some time but he is alone and has some salmon that he had prepared. When asked, the fisherman tells him that his best friend fell off the boat and drowned in the water. Starving for so long, he eats the meal while crying for his friend.

After being rescued, he goes to a diner and orders salmon. When he eats his meal, he jumps and commits suicide. Why did he do it?

Different lights make me strange by changing me into different sizes. What am I?

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.