Enter a keyword into the search box.  The riddle search will check to see if the word is in the Title, Riddle, or Answer and return results if they exist.


"Time" Riddles - Next 10 of 472.

Riddle: I change color from time to time. Wear me, and I'll tell you your ____. What am I?
Answer: A moodstone
Riddle: I am not your boss but I guide your decisions, I am not your trainer, but I dictate your pace, I am not a Judge but I measure your success. Who Am I?
Answer: Suggested answers from user comments: Yourself (3), Your Brain (2), Time (2), Fate (2), Conscience, Stopwatch, Your Soul, Addiction, or Heart. Which one is the best?
Riddle: Two hours ago it was as long after one o'clock in the afternoon as it was before one o'clock in the morning. What time is it now?
Answer: It would be 9:00 pm. There are 12 hours between 1:00 pm and 1:00 am and half of that is six hours. Half-way between would be 7 o'clock. Two hours later it would be 9:00 o'clock.
Riddle: A boy had just got out of the shower and getting ready for his prom, shaved, and with cologne and there was going to be an after-party, and his mom, and dad said to be home for the next sunrise and was home for the next sunrise but with a full-grown beard. How can this be?
Answer: He lives in Alaska and sunrises are every six months.
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: Given two 2s, "plus" can be changed to "times" without changing the results: 2 + 2= 2 x 2. The solution with three numbers is easy too: 1 + 2 + 3= 1 x 2 x 3. What is the answer for 4 numbers and for 5 numbers?
Answer: Solution for 4 numbers: 1 + 1 + 2 + 4= 1 x 1 x 2 x 4. Solution for 5 numbers: 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 5= 1 x 1 x 1 x 2 x 4  1 + 1 + 1 + 3 + 3= 1 x 1 x 1 x 2 x 4 1 + 1 +2 + 2 + 2= 1 x 1 x 2 x 2 x 2
Riddle: My first is in chocolate but not in ham, my second's in cake and also in jam, my third at tea-time is easily found, my whole is a friend who's often around. What am I?
Answer: A Cat!
Riddle: I like to be blue and have been since '63, but I could be anything if my circuit was fixed. I'm small yet infinitely bigger. I was grown but I'm made of metal. I am the last of my kind just like my beautiful idiot once was. Together we will travel, have traveled or are traveling. Tenses as seen, seeing, will see, are mysterious to me. Wibblies and wobblies, time correctly described by a Lord. What will I be, what have I been, or is it, what am I?
Answer: The T.A.R.D.I.S. from Doctor Who.
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: 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.