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"Life" Riddles - Final 8 of 128
Riddle:
I am something, I am endless as chain. Once you have me you are bound for life but young girls want me. What am I?
Answer: A wedding ring.
Riddle:
What exists but no-body can enter and is unreachable in life?
Answer: Heaven.
Riddle:
A man grabbed a woman's ring and pulled on it, then dropped it. How did this save her life?
Answer: They were skydiving, and she was unconscious. He pulled the ripcord ring for her, and the parachute opened.
Riddle:
In 2000, a 40-year-old doctor told his son that when a little boy he decided to be a doctor by seeing a internet web site about performing a heart transplant on a puppy with a defective heart so that the puppy would live a normal life. I then thought that I would be a doctor so that I could help people in a similar way. What is the defect in this story?
Answer: The internet did not exist when the doctor was a little boy.
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 forest exists somewhere on Earth. This forest has no life except for trees. After a storm, a tree was hit by lightning and falls.
What sound would it make?
Answer: None. Sound does not exist if it is unheard.
Riddle:
I move very slowly at an imperceptible rate, although I take my time, I am never late. I accompany life, and survive past demise, I am viewed with esteem in many women's eyes.
What am I?
Answer: I am your hair.
Riddle:
Two men walk into a restaurant by the sea and sit at the bar. Both men are covered in water. Both men order a plate of Albatross and take one bite. After chewing and swallowing, the first man stands up, walks outside, and shoots himself, while the other finnishes his meal. Why?
Answer: The two men were stranded out in the ocean with a third man when they were beginning to stave. When an albatross landed on their life boat and died they finally had food but it was not enough to feed all three of them. They drew straws and the looser was killed and eaten. They mixed up the human meat and the albatross meat so neither person would know what they were eating. After being rescued, the friends went to eat real Albatross and the man who killed himself realized that he was the one that ate his friend.
