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"Tha" Riddles - Next 10 of 929.
Riddle:
Can you find an imaginary thing that has nothing but something?
Answer: The number 0.
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:
If a stopper and a bottle cost $2.10 and the bottle costs $2.00 more than the stopper.
Then what does the stopper cost?
Answer: Five Cents.
Riddle:
Lazy Larry agreed to work on a job for his brother-in-law for thirty hours at eight dollars an hour, on the condition that he would forfeit ten dollars per hour for every hour that he idled. At the end of the thirty hours Larry wasn't owed any money and didn't owe his brother-in-law any money either. How many hours did Larry work and how many hours did he idle?
Answer: Lazy Larry worked 16-2/3 hours and idled 13-1/3 hours. 16-2/3 hours, at $8.00 an hour amounts to the same amount as 13-1/3 hours at $10.00 per hour.
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:
I'm as small as a pea but I'm as big as the sky and I don't belong to the person that purchases me. What am I?
Answer: A Gift.
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:
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:
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.
Riddle:
I have two coins, one is marked George I and one is marked George IV. One is genuine but one is a forgery. Which is the forgery?
Answer: George I. A coin would not be marked Goerge I because at the time it was produced it would not have been known that there was going to be a George II.
