Suppose we lay down two cups in front of you. One of the cups is filled with tea and the other one with coffee. Now we ask you to take a spoonful of tea and mix it with the coffee. At this moment, the coffee cup has a mixture of tea and coffee. You have to take that mixture (spoonful) and add it back to the tea.
Can you now tell if the cup of coffee has more tea or the cup of tea has more coffee?
If you were to put a coin into an empty bottle and then insert a cork into the neck, how could you remove the coin without taking out the cork or breaking the bottle?
Jessica is telling her friends this story and asks them to guess if it’s the truth or a lie: “There was a man sitting in a house at night that had no lights on at all. There was no lamp, no candle, and no other source of light. Yet, he sat in the house and read his book happily.†Her friends say she’s lying, but Jessica corrects them and says she’s telling the truth. Jessica’s story is true—but how?
A river should be crossed by a father, a mother and their two sons and two daughters.
There are some rules that should be followed while crossing the river. There can be only two people in the raft while crossing. The daughters cannot be with their father unless there is the presence of the mother. The sons cannot be with their mothers unless the father is present. Unless the guard is on the board, the criminals cannot be with any of the family members. Only the adults like the father, the guard, and the mother knows to use the raft.
In a box, there is a jumble of 7 red balls, 6 blue balls, 5 green balls, and 4 yellow balls. What is the minimum number of balls, will you have to pick up so that you have at least 4 balls of the same colour?
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.