Today, I want to share with you some tricky puzzles that often stump people. These puzzles may seem simple at first, but they can be quite challenging to solve. Let’s take a look at a few of them:
1. Hello duckies
Imagine there are two ducks in front of two ducks, two ducks behind two ducks, and two ducks in between. How many ducks are there in total? The correct answer is 4 ducks. Many people mistakenly think there are 6 ducks because they assume the ducks are next to each other. However, if you visualize the ducks in a single file line, you’ll see that there are only 4 ducks.
2. Concentric conundrum
Picture yourself walking around a circle with Big Ben at the center. If the radius of the circle is 1 km, you would walk roughly 6.28 km. But what about when the radius is 100 km or 10,000 km? The answer is no, you would not walk roughly 62,800 km when the radius is 10,000 km. The largest circle you can walk around Big Ben is the circumference of the Earth, which is about 40,000 km.
3. Hanging by a string
If a bottle of water hangs from the ceiling by a string and a handle hangs from the bottle by a piece of the same type of string, which string would break if you pull the handle down? The answer depends on how you pull the handle. If you pull slowly, the top string will break first. But if you give it a quick jerk, the bottom string will break first.
These puzzles may seem straightforward, but they often trick people into giving the wrong answers. If you enjoy solving puzzles like these, you might be interested in my new book “Think Twice,” which features 70 similar puzzles from various subjects. The book will be available on September 5 in the UK and October 22 in the USA. If you want to support my work and enjoy more puzzles like these, consider pre-ordering a copy.
I want to thank Fabio Ciuffoli and Nikolai Andreev for sharing these puzzles with me. I’ve been sharing puzzles here every other Monday since 2015, and I’m always looking for new and exciting puzzles to share. If you have a puzzle you’d like to suggest, feel free to email me.
