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"3" Riddles - Next 10 of 3602.

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: It stands on one leg with its heart in its head. What is it?
Answer: A cabbage.
Riddle: An officer wishing to arrange his men in a solid square found by his first arrangement that he had 39 men left over. He then started increasing the number of men on a side by one, but found that 50 additional men would be needed to complete a new square. How many men did the officer have?
Answer: The officer had 1975 men. When he formed a square measuring 44 by 44, he had 39 men over. When he tried to form a square 45 x 45, he was 50 men short.
Riddle: A house has 6 stories, each the same height. How many times as long is the ascent to the sixth floor as the ascent to the third?
Answer: 2 1/2 times (5/2, not 6/3).
Riddle: There are 4 borthers 3 of them want to buy a television which is 30 pounds. Each of them pay 10 pound each they give the money to the fourth brother and asked him to go into town and buy the television. When he got there the man said there was 5 pounds off so the fourth brother took the 5 pound and television and left. He decided to make some money out of this so he took 2 pounds and give the other 3 pounds to his brothers. So the 3 brothers only payed 9 pounds each. 3 times 9 is 27 were is the last pound?
Answer: Add 3 on to 25 = 28 then add 2
Riddle: What do you call an out of work Ghost?
Answer: Lazy Bones.
Riddle: Why did the game warden arrest the Ghost?
Answer: He did not have a current haunting license.
Riddle: How many three cent stamps are in a dozen?
Answer: A dozen, although you probably said four.
Riddle: 1. Carnation, Peony, Tomato, Rose 2. North America, Australia, Asia, Canada 3. Dodgers, Cubs, Cowboys, Cardinals 4. Laugh, Giggle, Chuckle, Cry 5. Southeast, Southwest, Northeast, East Which one does not belong to each line?
Answer: 1.  Tomato because the others are all flowers. 2. Canada because the others are all continents. 3. Could be Dodgers  because it starts with a D or could be Cowboys because the others are baseball teams. 4. Cry because the others are about happiness and being glad. 5. East because the others are intermediate directions.  
Riddle: Mr. Grumper grumbles about bad time-keeping trains like everybody else. On one particular morning he was justified, though. The train left on time for the one hour journey and it arrived 5 minutes late. However, Mr. Grumper's watch showed it to be 3 minutes early, so he adjusted his watch by putting it forward 3 minutes. His watch kept time during the day, and on the return journey in the evening the train started on time, according to his watch, and arrived on time, according to the station clock. If the train traveled 25 percent faster on the return journey than it did on the morning journey, was the station clock fast or slow, and by how much?
Answer: The station clock is 3 minutes fast. The morning journey took 65 minutes, and the evening journey therefore took 52 minutes, and the train arrived 57 minutes after it should have left, that is, 3 minutes early.