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"King" Riddles - Next 10 of 379.

Riddle: There are 50 horses and 50 kings riding along an old dirt road. They came to a peach tree with 50 peaches. Each took one, yet there were still 49 left. How is this possible?
Answer: Each is the name of one of the kings and he's the only one that took one!
Riddle: Walking home one day, you take a short cut along the train tracks. The tracks cross a narrow bridge over a deep gorge. At the point you are 3/8 of the way across the bridge, you hear the train whistle somewhere behind you. You charge across the bridge, and jump off the track as the train is about to run you down. As it happens, if you had gone the other way, you would have reached safety just before being run over as well. If you can run ten miles per hour, how fast is the train moving?
Answer: The train is moving at 40 miles per hour. Imagine that a friend is walking with you. When the train whistle blows, you head away from the train, he heads toward it. When he reaches safety, you will be 6/8 (or 3/4)of the way across the bridge, and the train will have just reached the bridge. For the train to cross 4/4 of the bridge in the time you cross the remaining 1/4, the train must be moving four times your speed.
Riddle: Granny looked up from her rocking chair and said: As far as I can tell, there is only one anagram of the word trinket. What is it?
Answer: The word knitter.
Riddle: You're stranded in a rainforest, and you've eaten a poisonous mushroom. To save your life, you need an antidote excreted by a certain species of frog. Unfortunately, only the female frog produces the antidote. The male and female look identical, but the male frog has a distinctive croak. Derek Abbott shows how to use conditional probability to make sure you lick the right frog and get out alive. How do you get out alive?
Answer: If you chose to go to the clearing, you're right, but the hard part is correctly calculating your odds.  There are two common incorrect ways of solving this problem.  Wrong answer number one:  Assuming there's a roughly equal number of males and females, the probability of any one frog being either sex is one in two, which is 0.5, or 50%.  And since all frogs are independent of each other, the chance of any one of them being female should still be 50% each time you choose.  This logic actually is correct for the tree stump, but not for the clearing.  Wrong answer two:  First, you saw two frogs in the clearing.  Now you've learned that at least one of them is male, but what are the chances that both are?  If the probability of each individual frog being male is 0.5, then multiplying the two together will give you 0.25, which is one in four, or 25%.  So, you have a 75% chance of getting at least one female and receiving the antidote.  So here's the right answer.  Going for the clearing gives you a two in three chance of survival, or about 67%.  If you're wondering how this could possibly be right, it's because of something called conditional probability.  Let's see how it unfolds.  When we first see the two frogs, there are several possible combinations of male and female. If we write out the full list, we have what mathematicians call the sample space, and as we can see, out of the four possible combinations, only one has two males.  So why was the answer of 75% wrong?  Because the croak gives us additional information.  As soon as we know that one of the frogs is male, that tells us there can't be a pair of females, which means we can eliminate that possibility from the sample space, leaving us with three possible combinations.  Of them, one still has two males, giving us our two in three, or 67% chance of getting a female.  This is how conditional probability works.  You start off with a large sample space that includes every possibility.  But every additional piece of information allows you to eliminate possibilities, shrinking the sample space and increasing the probability of getting a particular combination.  The point is that information affects probability.  And conditional probability isn't just the stuff of abstract mathematical games. It pops up in the real world, as well.  Computers and other devices use conditional probability to detect likely errors in the strings of 1's and 0's that all our data consists of.  And in many of our own life decisions, we use information gained from past experience and our surroundings to narrow down our choices to the best options so that maybe next time, we can avoid eating that poisonous mushroom in the first place.
Riddle: A man is discovered dead sitting at his desk, alone in the locked office. He did not commit suicide and there was no weapons in the room. The only clue is a sealed envelope on the desk in front of him. How did he die?
Answer: The envelope glue was poisoned and when the man licked the envelope to seal it, he died.
Riddle: Lauren and Alice are talking long distance on the phone. Lauren is in an East-Coast US state which borders the Atlantic Ocean, and Alice is in a West-Coast state which borders the Pacific Ocean. Lauren asks Alice: "What time is it?" Alice replies and Lauren says: "That's really odd. It's the same time here!" How can this be?
Answer: Alice is in Eastern Oregon (in Mountain time) and Lauren is in Western Florida (in Central time). It is the night that daylight-savings time changes back to standard time any time after 1:00 and before 2:00 AM.
Riddle: Who do witches stop for on the highway?
Answer: Witch-hikers.
Riddle: It takes the town hall clock 6 seconds to strike 4 o'clock in the afternoon. How long does it take to strike midnight?
Answer: 22 Seconds.
Riddle: Mr. and Mrs. Smith were walking home from the shopping mall with their purchases when Mr. Smith began to complain that his load was too heavy. Mrs. Smith turned to her husband and said, "I don't know what you're complaining about because if you gave me one of your parcels, I would have twice as many as you and if I gave you just one of mine, we would have equal loads." How many parcels was each carrying?
Answer: Mrs. Smith was carrying seven parcels and Mr. Smith was carrying five.
Riddle: Alice is walking through the forest of forgetfulness. She wants to know what day of the week it is. She stops and asks a lion and a unicorn. Now the lion lies all of the time on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The unicorn always lies on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Alice asks the lion what day it is, he says, "Well, yesterday was one of my lying days." Alice can't figure it out just from the lion's answer so she asks the unicorn and the unicorn says, "Yesterday was also one of my lying days." What day is it?
Answer: Thursday.