THE TUESDAY BUSINESS CORNER - CHRISTMAS QUIZ :

Happy Christmas

Something a little different for you to ponder during your last week of work in 2012.
I'll post the answers tomorrow. Good luck...

Question 1

Tom’s mother has three children. One is called April; one is called May. What’s the third one called?

Question 2

How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark?

Question 3

A man buys rice for £1 per kilogram and sells it for 20p per kilogram.  He does this every day for many years. As a result, he becomes a millionaire.  How is this possible?

Question 4

A Liverpool-based hairdresser recently said that he would rather cut the hair of three Londoners than one Liverpudlian.  Why?

Question 5

You’re riding a horse.  A lion is chasing you. Unfortunately, there’s an elephant in front of you moving at the same pace as you, and you can’t overtake it.  There’s a hippo to the left running at the same speed, and there’s a wall on your right. How do you get to safety?

Question 6

The letters “ough” can be pronounced in eight different ways.  For instance, in the word “rough” they are pronounced “uff”. What are the other seven?

Question 7

Fred is lying dead in the middle of a room.  He is surrounded by a pool of water and broken glass.  The only furniture in the room is a table, which is next to Fred.

The room has one door and one small window.  Nobody has been through the door, and the window is 2 metres off the ground.

Fred didn’t drown, nor are there any cuts on his body. He didn’t commit suicide. How did he die?

Question 8

Four men want to marry a princess.  The king devises a contest to see who should win her hand in marriage.

He puts her in the middle of a square, carpeted room. Each wall is 10m long.  One man stands in each corner of the room, each on their own small box.  The first one to touch the princess’s hand will marry her.  The only rules are that the men can’t walk on the carpet, or use anything but their body – no ladders, rope swings etc.

One man figured out a way to touch her hand in less than five seconds.  What did he do?

Question 9

A boat has a ladder hanging over the side of it.  It has six rungs, each 10cm apart.  The bottom rung is 10cm above the water.  The tide rises at 20cm every 15 minutes.  High tide peaks in one hour.  When the tide is at its highest, how many rungs will be under water?

Question 10

A man was killed on a Sunday morning.  His wife found the body and called the police.  When they arrived, they questioned the four people who work in the house, who said:

The chef: ‘I was making breakfast’
The maid: ‘I was getting the mail’
The butler: ‘I was setting the table’
The gardener: ‘I was watering the plants’
The wife had a cast-iron alibi. The police immediately knew who the murderer was.  Who was it, and how did they know?

Question 11

Two fuses each take exactly one hour to burn. Neither burns at a steady rate.  For example, one could take 59 minutes to burn the first centimetre, then burn the rest of the fuse in the last minute.

How could you use these two fuses to measure 45 minutes?

Question 12

Once upon a time, there was a recluse who never left home.  His only visitors were people who brought him food and supplies, but they never came inside.

One stormy night, he had a nervous breakdown, went upstairs and turned off all the lights and went to bed.  Next morning, he found he’d caused the deaths of hundreds of people.  How?

Question 13

Assume there are approximately six billion people on the earth.  If you were to multiply together the number of fingers on every person’s left hand, what would you guess the total would be? (If you can’t guess the number, estimate how long the number would be).

Question 14

A man leaves home, turns left, goes straight, turns left again, goes straight again and then turns left once more before returning home.  When he gets there, there’s another man with a mask on.  What’s going on?

Question 15

This is an unusual paragraph.  I’m curious as to how quickly you can find out what’s so unusual about it.  It looks so ordinary that you could think nothing was wrong with it.  In fact nothing is wrong with it.  But it is highly unusual.  Study it.  Think about it.  Try to work it out. Any thoughts?

Written by NativeEnglish

Native English Spain is dedicated to make learning English simple, fun and affordable for Spanish people.