Brain Teaser

A brain teaser is a type of puzzle that is written or spoken, and which requires mental reasoning to solve. The distinguishing characteristic of a brain teaser is that the only thing required to solve it is your brain. Sometimes, a simple calculations or trivia knowledge is necessary, but generally a brain teaser only requires a brain.

The difficulty of many brain teasers relies on a certain degree of fallacy in human intuitiveness. This is most common in brain teasers relating to conditional probability, This is different to other types puzzles, like Crosswords or Rubik's Cubes, which are not considered to be brain teasers, because they involve a lot of work with pencil and paper. Brain teasers are often categorized by their method of construction or by the skill required to solve them.

Polly Wants a Parrot

Polly Perkins was after a talking parrot, so she went to the local pet shop in the hope of securing such a find. She was in luck. The shop assistant assured her that the parrot would learn and repeat any word or phrase it heard. Polly was delighted. However, a week later, the parrot still hadn't spoken a word. Polly returned to the shop to complain, however, it appeared that the assistant was accurate in what he had said, and refused a refund. Why didn't the parrot talk?

A: The parrot was deaf and as such couldn't repeat a single word it had heard!

What Year

What year comes next in this sequence: 1973 1979 1987 1993 1997 1999

A: 2003: they are prime years.

Magnets

You are in a room where there are no metal objects except for two iron rods. Only one of them is a magnet. How can you identify this magnet?

A: You can hang the iron rods on a string and watch which one turns to the north (or hang just one rod).

Unreliable Clock

You have the misfortune to own an unreliable clock. This one loses exactly 24 minutes every hour. It is now showing 3:00am and you know that is was correct at midnight, when you set it. The clock stopped 1 hour ago, what is the correct time now?

A: 6:00am: since the clock is losing 24 minutes every hour, for every real hour that has passed, the clock will only show 36 minutes. Since the clock shows 3:00am, we know that 180 clock minutes have passed. This therefore equals 300 real minutes and hence 5 hours. The clock stopped 1 hour ago and the time must now be 6.00am. QED.

Anagram words

Below are six clues to six words. When arranged in the correct order, each word is an anagram of the previous word with a letter removed. capital of France snake headache tablet single article twisted ankle coarse file equally

A: Aspirin, sprain, Paris, rasp, asp, as, a.