You have 12 coins, but one is counterfeit and is either heavier or lighter than the rest.
You also have a balance scale and can only use it three times.
How do you find the counterfeit coin and determine whether it is heavier or lighter?
Divide the 12 coins into three groups:
Weigh Group A against Group B.
👉 You can always find the counterfeit coin and determine if it’s heavier or lighter in exactly 3 weighings.
You have 12 coins, but one is counterfeit and is either heavier or lighter than the rest.
You also have a balance scale and can only use it three times.
How do you find the counterfeit coin and determine whether it is heavier or lighter?
A man drives one mile at 30 mph.
How fast must he drive the second mile to average 60 mph for the total two-mile trip?
👉 It’s impossible.
To average 60 mph over 2 miles, he must complete the trip in 2 minutes (since 2 miles ÷ 60 mph = 2 minutes).
Even if he drove infinitely fast, he still wouldn’t reach the required average speed.
What comes once in a second, twice in a decade, but never in a century?
The letter “D”.
A man is running away from home.
What is he doing?
He is running around the bases in a game of baseball.
A man lives on the 10th floor of an apartment building.
Every morning, he takes the elevator down to the ground floor to go to work.
However, when he comes home, he only takes the elevator up to the 7th floor and walks the rest of the way to the 10th floor.
Why does he do this?
The man is a small and can only reach the 7th-floor button in the elevator.
A king gives you two jars and 100 marbles—50 white and 50 black. He will randomly select one jar, then pick one marble from it.
How should you distribute the marbles to maximize your survival?
Put 1 white marble in one jar and the remaining 99 marbles (49 white + 50 black) in the other jar.
50% × 100% + 50% × 49.49% = 50% + 24.75% = 74.75%
✅ This setup gives you a 74.75% chance of survival, the highest possible.
Four people need to cross a rickety bridge at night, but they must use a single flashlight to see where they’re going. The bridge can only hold two people at a time, and both must move at the speed of the slower person. The flashlight must always be carried across the bridge, meaning someone must bring it back for the next group.
Each person takes a different time to cross:
How can all four people cross the bridge in just 17 minutes?
2 + 1 + 10 + 2 + 2 = 17 minutes
Two trains are 50 miles apart, traveling toward each other at 25 miles per hour each. A bird starts flying from the front of one train at 100 miles per hour, flying back and forth between the two trains until they collide. How far does the bird travel before the collision?
The bird travels 100 miles before the trains collide.
Instead of calculating each individual leg of the bird’s flight, let’s take a simpler approach using time.
Time until collision:
Distance traveled by the bird:
Two fathers and two sons go fishing. Each catches one fish, but at the end of the trip, they have only three fish in total. How is this possible?
They are a grandfather, a father, and a son—three people total.
I am a kind of coat that can only be put on when wet. What am I?
A coat of paint.
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