Lateral Thinking Puzzles

These puzzles are sometimes called Brain Teasers or Thinking-outside-the-box because, when it comes down to it, they need that extra bit of imagination to solve. Can you work out the answers?

We have a carton holding of six eggs and six people present. Each person takes an egg but at the end there is one egg still in the carton. How can that be?

Answer

— The last person takes the carton with the last egg still in it.

Can you work out the number of this car’s parking bay?

Answer

— It’s Bay 87. The numbers read from the top of the screen.

Three bags and twelve marbles. It’s easy to put 4 marbles into each bag. Can you work out how to put 6 marbles into each bag (without looking for more marbles) ?

Answer

— Put one bag inside another then put six marbles into the inner bag and the other six marbles into the third bag.

As a practical joke, your flatmate replaces the salt in three of your four salt pots with sugar. But she also leaves messages on each. If only one of these inscriptions is true, which pot still contains salt? This is more circular than lateral thinking.

Answer

— Salt pot C contains salt. If A is true D must be true which cannot be. If B is true, C must be false so C is also salt. If C is true, A and B must be false so they both have salt in. If D is true, both A and B are sugar and C is salt. This is the only combination that makes sense so the salt is in pot C.

A carpenter was working at her bench when something caused her to stop. She didn’t want it and was determined to get rid of it. But she couldn’t, so she brought it home with her. What was it that stopped her working?

Answer

— It was a splinter in her finger (despite wearing gloves).

There are 362,880 numbers you can create using the digits 1 to 9, trust me. For example the smallest 123,456,789 and the largest 987,654,321. Of all of these why is this number special — 854,917,632

Answer

— This number has the digits arranged in alphabetical order from Eight to Two.

A police detective was walking down a corridor when suddenly he heard a woman screaming, “Edward, Edward don’t kill me!” A shot rang out and the detective burst in to discover a dead woman lying on the floor with a gun beside her. On the other side of the room stood a bearded man, a figure in overalls and a person with a tattooed right arm. He looked at them, approached the bearded man and said: “I arrest you for killing this woman.” It was indeed the bearded man who killed her but how could the detective be so sure?

Answer

— The figure in overalls and the person with the tattoos were both women.

How would you divide a simple plain cake equally between eight people with just three straight cuts?

Answer

— First cut the cake in half, then cut each half into half again so that the cake is in quarters. Now comes the clever bit - cut the cake again but this time horizontally half way down. You now have eight equal pieces. Easy.