Sherlock Holmes was challenged to make a pre-drawn line smaller without erasing it. He did it in fractions of seconds. How?

Birbal was jester, counsellor, and fool to the great Moghul emperor, Akbar.
The villagers loved to talk of Birbal's wisdom and cleverness,
and the emperor loved to try to outsmart him.
One day Akbar (emperor) drew a line across the floor.
"Birbal," he ordered, "you must make this line shorter, but you cannot erase any bit of it."
Everyone present thought the emperor had finally outsmarted Birbal.
It was clearly an impossible task.
Yet within moments the emperor and everyone else present had to agree that Birbal had made the line shorter without erasing any of it.
How could this be?

Is the statement valid that it does not matter how much older a sibling is, eventually the younger one will be half as old as the older one?

During an experiment, a guy throws a bouncy ball from a 100 feet tall building. The ball has a specific characteristic. Every time it hits the ground, it bounces up halfway.

How many bounces do you think the ball will make before it comes to a stop ?

You have a square. What you have to do is cut and reassemble the square such that you create a Red Cross sign that has the same volume as that of the square.

Alex is stranded on an island covered in forest.
One day, when the wind is blowing from the west, lightning strikes the west end of the island and sets fire to the forest. The fire is very violent, burning everything in its path, and without intervention the fire will burn the whole island, killing the man in the process.

There are cliffs around the island, so he cannot jump off.

How can the Alex survive the fire? (There are no buckets or any other means to put out the fire)

Find out a multi-digit number that if multiplied by the number 9 or any of its multiplications products (i.e. 18, 27, 36, 45,..) will result in the multiplication factor repeated (n) number of times.

In a football game, Christina defeated Teresa by 2 - 0 but no man from either side scored. How can this be possible?

What is next number in the pattern below:

131 517 192 123 ?

What's the best place to go shopping in the ocean?