Riddle:
A man strolls into a hospital emergency room where there is a long line up to the reception desk. He walks right to the front and clamly asks to see the consultant in charge. No one gets angry and the receptionist immediately phones. The consultant has never met this man, yet she hurries away from the ward to see him.
Why?
Answer: The man is a florist delievering a bouquet of flowers for the consultant.
Riddle:
How many pluses should we put between the digits of 987,654,321 to get a total of 99, and where?
Answer: (6) 9 + 8 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 43 + 21= 99
(7) 9 + 8 + 7 + 65 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1= 99
Riddle:
My only timepiece is a wall clock. One day I forgot to wind it and it stopped. I went to visit a friend whos watch is always correct, stayed awhile, and then went home. There I made a simple calculation and set the clock right.
How did I do this even though I had no watch on me to tell how long it took me to return from my friend's house?
Answer: Before I left, I wound the wall clock. When I returned, the change in time equaled how long it took to go to my friends house and return, plus the time I spent there. But I knew the latter because I looked at my friends watch when I arrived and left.
Subtracting the time of the visit from the time I was absent from my house, and dividing by 2, I obtained the time it took me to return home. I added this time to what my friend watch showed when I left, and set the sum on my wall clock.
Riddle:
What question can never be answered with a Yes?
Answer: Are you asleep?
Riddle:
What is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear anywhere on the periodic table of elements?
Answer: The Letter J.
Riddle:
How many months have twenty-eight days?
Answer: All twelve months have 28 days.
Riddle:
Two schoolgirls were traveling from the city to a dacha (summer cottage) on an electric train.
"I notice," one of the girls said "that the dacha trains coming in the opposite direction pass us every 5 minutes. What do you think-how many dacha trains arrive in the city in an hour, given equal speeds in both directions?"
"Twelve, of course," the other girl answered, "because 60 divided by 5 equals 12."
The first girl did not agree. What do you think?
Answer: If the girls had been on a standing train, the first girl's calculations would have been correct, but their train was moving. It took 5 minutes to meet a second train, but then it took the second train 5 more minutes to reach where the girls met the first train. So the time between trains is 10 minutes, not 5, and only 6 trains per hour arrive in the city.
Riddle:
When the celebrated German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) was nine he was asked to add all the integers from 1 through 100. He quickly added 1 to 100, 2 to 99, and so on for 50 pairs of numbers each adding to 101.
Answer: 50 X 101=5,050.
What is the sum of all the digits in integers from 1 through 1,000,000,000? (That's all the digits in all the numbers, not all the numbers themselves.)
Answer: The numbers can be grouped by pairs:
999,999,999 and 0;
999,999,998 and 1'
999,999,997 and 2;
and so on....
There are half a billion pairs, and the sum of the digits in each pair is 81. The digits in the unpaired number, 1,000,000,000, add to 1. Then:
(500,000,000 X 81) + 1= 40,500,000,001.
Riddle:
A soccer fan, upset by the defeat of his favorite team, slept restlessly. In his dream a goalkeeper was practicing in a large unfurnished room, tossing a soccer ball against the wall and then catching it.
But the goalkeeper grew smaller and smaller and then changed into a ping-pong ball while the soccer ball was swelled up into a huge cast-iron ball. The iron ball circled round madly, trying to crush the ping-pong ball, how did the ping-pong find safety whithout leaving the floor?
Answer: If the ping-pong ball rolls flush against the wall, the cast-iron ball cannot crush it.
Those who know geometry can determine that if the diameter of a large ball is at least 5.83 (3+2(square root of 2) times as large as the diameter of a little ball, then the little ball will be safe if it hugs the wall.
A cast-iron ball that is larger than a soccer ball is more than 4.83 times as large in diameter as a ping-pong ball.
Riddle:
As I traveled up and down our great glorious country, I found myself in a place where the tempature goes up sharply in the day and down at night. This had an effect on my watch, I noticed it was 1/2 a minute faster at nightfall, but at dawn it had lost 1/3 minute, making it only 1/6 minute fast.
One morning- May 1- my watch showed the right time. By what date was it 5 minutes faster?
Answer: In 24 hours the watch gained 1/2-1/3= 1/6 minute. It would seem it would be 5 minutes fast in 5 X 6= 30 days; that is,the morning of May 31. But already on the morning of May 28 the was 27/6= 4 1/2 minutes fast. At the close of the day the watch gained 1/2 minute more, so it was 5 minutes fast on may 28.
