The captain of a ship was telling this interesting story: "We travelled the sea far and wide. At one time, two of my sailors were standing on opposite sides of the ship. One was looking west and the other one east. And at the same time, they could see each other clearly." How can that be possible?
A large water tank has two inlet pipes (a large one and a small one) and one outlet pipe. It takes 3 hours to fill the tank with the large inlet pipe. On the other hand, it takes 6 hours to fill the tank with the small inlet pipe. The outlet pipe allows the full tank to be emptied in 9 hours.
What fraction of the tank (initially empty) will be filled in 0.64 hours if all three pipes are in operation? Give your answer to two decimal places (e.g., 0.25, 0.5, or 0.75).
A woman lives in a skyscraper thirty-six floors high and is served by several elevators which stop at each floor going up and down. Each morning she leaves her apartment and goes to one of the elevators. Whichever one she takes is three times more likely to be going up than down. Why?
You have 21 jars with you. Out of them, 7 are filled with water, 7 are half-full with water and 7 are empty. How will you distribute the jars among three people such that each one of them gets an equal number of jars and an equal amount of water?
One day, all the courtiers from Akbar's court were gathered in the assembly hall when one of them told the Emperor that all his valuables had been stolen by a thief the previous night.
This shocked the Emperor to his core as the place where that courter stayed was the most secured in the kingdom. The Emperor thought that it is not at all possible for an outsider to enter into the courtier's house and steal the valuables. Only another courtier could commit this crime. He quickly called Birbal to identify the thief.
Birbal thought for a while and successfully solved the mystery by identifying the thief in just one statement.
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.