A riddle is usually a question or phrase that has a veiled meaning or is not immediately obvious, with a puzzle for the listener to solve. Here are 6 riddles we bet you can’t solve.
1. Nana, Nene, Nini, Nono
Image source - mentalfloss.com
Riddle: Mary’s father has 5 daughters: 1) Nana 2) Nene 3) Nini 4) Nono. What is the name of the 5th daughter?
Answer: Mary. While you may have been tempted to say “Nunu”, the riddle explicitly states at the beginning “Mary’s father…”
2. Monty Hall
Image source - jasperjournal.com
Riddle: Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Answer: As the player cannot be certain which of the two remaining unopened doors is the winning door, and initially all doors were equally likely, most people assume that each of two remaining closed doors has an equal probability and conclude that switching does not matter.
However, under standard assumptions, the player should switch—doing so doubles the overall probability of winning the car from 1/3 to 2/3. This can be proved very complicatedly through mathematics, or shown through a diagram:
Image source - Wikipedia
3. The Hobbit
Image source - rabittooth.com
Riddle:
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
Answer: Time
4. Missing dollar riddle
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Riddle: Three guests check into a hotel room. The clerk says the bill is $30, so each guest pays $10. Later the clerk realizes the bill should only be $25. To rectify this, he gives the bellhop $5 to return to the guests. On the way to the room, the bellhop realizes that he cannot divide the money equally. As the guests didn’t know the total of the revised bill, the bellhop decides to just give each guest $1 and keep $2 for himself.
Now that each of the guests has been given $1 back, each has paid $9, bringing the total paid to $27. The bellhop has $2. If the guests originally handed over $30, what happened to the remaining $1?
Answer: The riddle misdirects by adding the $2 and $27 – the $2 is contained within the $27 already, so the addition is meaningless. Instead the $2 should be subtracted from the $27 to get the revised bill of $25.
The initial payment of $30 is accounted for as the clerk takes $25, the bellhop takes $2, and the guests get a $3 refund, adding up to $30. After the refund has been applied, we only have to account for a payment of $27. Again, the clerk keeps $25 and the bellhop gets $2. This also adds up.
5. Missing square
Image source - Wikipedia
Riddle: In the image above, where has the missing square gone?
Answer: Both of the 13×5 triangles aren’t actually triangles–the hypotenuse (the longest side) is bent. If you compare the ratio of the blue and red triangles, you get 2.5:1 and 2.667:1. If you look at the point where the red and blue triangle meet on the lower triangle, and compare that point to the top triangle, you’ll see the edge is slightly over/under the mark.
The bend is about 1.25 degrees, and is difficult to see; but it is the accumulative difference in the bend that creates the missing square.
6. Die hard
Image source - fanpop.com
Riddle:
I have one, you have one.
If you remove the first letter, a bit remains.
If you remove the second, bit still remains.
After much trying, you might be able to remove the third one also, but it remains.
It dies hard!
Answer:
Habit:
Remove h – a bit remains
Remove a – bit remains
Remove b – it remains
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