Stock Lateral Thinking Puzzle

The trickier variant of the Stock Puzzle where the solution doesn't just require the application of logic and reasoning but the ability to think of things in another way. Frequently they are presented to appear like a difficult regular puzzle, but with a trick solution that is simple but not obvious.

Can sometimes be frustrating as it is often perfectly possible to construct a solution that explains all the presented facts in an unconnected way, but isn't the "right" answer that explains things by tying everything together.

As there are entire websites dedicated to building collections of lateral thinking puzzles, please limit examples to puzzles that have been featured in the media (somewhere other than puzzle books).

St. Ives Puzzle
As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each of the wives had seven sacks, each of the sacks had seven cats, each of the cats had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many were going to St. Ives? Solution:
 * A variant asks instead, "How many T's are in all of that?", seemingly turning the numbers into a red herring.
 * Die Hard With A Vengance: As part of Simon's game, Carver and McClane must solve the riddle and dial him back on 555-[The answer] before a bomb explodes.
 * Perplex City
 * Knights of the Old Republic: Thankfully, the questions are for what is essentially a Jedi placement exam, so there are no "wrong" answers - but the lateral ones imply you're a character who prefers thinking your way out of problems, as opposed to finessing or forcing.
 * Lest we not forget about the riddle that you can ask the prisoner in the mysterious box to get yourself free.
 * Sesame Street: The girl calculates the total number of people as the song is sung the second time and reveals her answer after being told the trick.
 * And again with Kermit singing it as a song, with Grover frantically trying to keep track of the total.

Three Plus Five Make Four
How do you measure exactly 4 gallons using only a 3 and a 5 gallon jug? Solution: This has its own page as a Stock Puzzle, as it's somewhere between a lateral thinking puzzle and a regular logic puzzle. It's really about linear Diophantine equations, which are solvable by Euclid's algorithm using Bezout's lemma.
 * Turns up in Die Hard With A Vengance.
 * One of the puzzles in Professor Layton.
 * Knights of the Old Republic: In this example, the substance is gas pressure, but the method of solving it is exactly the same.
 * One of a series of puzzles in Runescape.
 * There's a similar puzzle with different volumes in Zork Zero.

Two Coins Puzzle
I have two coins that add up to 30 cents and one of them isn't a nickel. What are they? Solution:
 * Scrubs: Used by JD to trick the Janitor and Troy with this puzzle, who are thoroughly confused by the wordplay. Their solution involves scouring a book for coin collectors, finding and pointing out a coin that the book prices at 29 cents. Their response at the end of the episode is to pose their own puzzle. "Two guys destroyed your bike with a softball bat and a crowbar, one of them wasn't me."
 * An episode of The Cosby Show has a member of the family tell this riddle as part of a bet.

How Many Drivers?
You're driving a bus to London with 8 passengers. At the first stop half of them get off and twice that number get on. At the next stop 1/3 of them get off and 3/4 the number of remaining passengers get on. At the last stop before London 5 people get on. How many people are driving the bus when it reaches London? Solution:
 * There's a song that has a modified version of this puzzle (they wanted the number of people on the bus); the answer they give is zero, because "there are no buses in Gensokyo" (for the record, the answer if you followed the puzzle is half a person). Given that the song in question is named (in English) Cirno's Perfect Math Class, the absurdity of the answer makes sense.
 * The question Cirno asks translates more to "How many passengers total?", which you might be inclined to answer the question after all that "How many passengers were left?"

The Doctors Son
A man and his son are in a car accident and the man is killed. The boy is rushed to hospital. The doctor takes one look at him and says "I can't operate on this child, he's my son!" How is that possible? Solution:
 * Equally effective is the gender-flipped variation, where it is the boy's mother killed and a nurse objecting to the operation.
 * Used in a "Woman's Lib" episode of All in The Family, when Gloria asks the riddle of the rest of the family.  gets it right.
 * Used in an episode of The Cosby Show. In the setup, they refer to the doctor as "The old surgeon" and Cliff insists that the only reason he didn't get it is that no woman would allow herself to be referred to as "old."
 * This riddle and several other listed here are lampshaded in "The Office" (US) Season 3 Episode 5 - "The Initiation". Dwight is attempting to teach Ryan - padawan style - the ways of the (sales) force, and is testing his intellect with a series of these hoary old riddles. Ryan knows them all and Dwight gets very frustrated until by the end, Dwight only has to say "A hunter..." and Ryan answers:
 * Hank is asked this one in an episode of Corner Gas, and ends up suggesting that the doctor is a ghost. Brent didn't get it either and asks for clarification of why Hank's theory couldn't be true.
 * The children's toy robot 2-XL asked this riddle, asking the child whether the story was possible or not. After revealing the answer the robot broke down laughing at you.
 * This one's lost a bit of the challenge, as it's perfectly reasonable to believe
 * There's a variation that goes as follows: A man, his wife, and their son are in a car accident. They are all rushed to the hospital and the doctor says, "I can't operate on him, he's my son." Solution:
 * So ur with ur honey and yur making out wen the phone rigns. U anser it n the vioce is “wut r u doing wit my daughter?” U tell ur girl n she say “my dad is ded”. THEN WHO WAS PHONE?

That's Impossible!
Various trick puzzles where it looks like there is a simple answer but it is in fact an invalid question:
 * Who's buried in Grant's Tomb? Answer:
 * This riddle was popularized by Groucho Marx on his game show You Bet Your Life, is "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" Though the proper answer is "nobody" Groucho would usually accept just "Grant." Groucho would ask this question to contestants to ensure that they won something on his show. It can also be a snide trick question: When the responder answers "Ulysses Grant," he can be termed wrong for forgetting or not knowing that Julia Grant is there also.
 * Then shouldn't it be "Grants' Tomb"?
 * This was averted in an episode of The Golden Girls, when it was the answer to Final Jeopardy in Dorothy Zbornak's dream sequence. Rose Nylund's response, "Who is Cary Grant ?" is deemed to be the correct response by both host Alex Trebek and series creator Merv Griffin.
 * "George Washington!"
 * If a plane crashes exactly on a border, where are the survivors buried? Answer:
 * Implied in the cold open of an episode of Batman the Brave And The Bold. The Riddler has Batman and Booster Gold chained up on a mock game show set, and gives Batman an electric shock for each question Booster gets wrong. A montage of the Riddler telling Booster the answers to questions he missed includes "You don't bury survivors."
 * This one comes up in Corner Gas, the same episode as the Doctor one above, and again Hank screws it up. He first asks whether the plane is distributed more on one side than the other, and then when Karen emphasises the word "survivors", he answers. "Oh! One on each side."
 * Also comes up in the deleted final scene of Die Hard With a Vengeance. Simon gets it right instantly.
 * If a rooster lays an egg on the exact peak of a barn, which side does it fall? Answer:
 * On an episode of The Simpsons Bart is dropped a grade and Lisa bumped up, leaving them both in the same class. This question stumps Lisa, but Bart gets it because he heard it the last time he was in that grade.
 * Again used in the Corner Gas episode, and Hank's answers include "The Alberta side," (referring to the plane crash example above). "The roof is flat," and "The egg is square!"
 * How many animals of each kind did Moses bring on the Ark with him? Answer:
 * Used by Samuel L Jackson's character in Basic.
 * Is the capital of Kentucky pronounced 'LOU-ee-vil' or 'LEW-iss-vil'? Answer:
 * Also commonly done with Florida and Miami.
 * How much dirt is there in a hole ___ by ___ by ___? Answer:
 * Is it legal for a man to marry his widow's sister? Answer:
 * Is it correct to say "the yolk of eggs is white" or "the yolk of eggs are white"? Answer:
 * Mentioned in one Miss Marple story, where she compares it to the mystery, which is also based on a trick question.
 * In answer to the Red Herring question,
 * If it takes six men six hours to dig a six-foot hole, how long does it take to dig half a hole? Answer:
 * If you have a cube, each edge two inches long, how many total square inches are there among all eight sides? Answer:
 * In answer to the Red Herring question,
 * If it takes six men six hours to dig a six-foot hole, how long does it take to dig half a hole? Answer:
 * If you have a cube, each edge two inches long, how many total square inches are there among all eight sides? Answer:

Tricks With Words
Often the trick is that the question being asked isn't actually the one you think due to tricky phrasing.
 * Floccinaucinihilipilification is a long word, how do you spell it? Answer:.
 * In a similar vein: "Railroad crossing, look at the cars; can you spell that without any R's?" Obviously, the answer is.
 * Think of words that end with the letters "gry". "Angry" is one, "hungry" is another. What is the third word in the English language?" The answer is
 * Curiously, this puzzle was invented by mistake. The original version merely asks for the third word containing "gry", which is "gryphon". Someone asked for a third word ending in "gry" by mistake, and since there isn't one, several trick answers were invented to fill the vacuum.
 * Planescape Torment had this very puzzle. Being based on Dungeons & Dragons rules, you had to solve it via your character's stats and not "your" own knowledge.
 * Xkcd gives the appropriate response to this kind of trickery.
 * Bonus points, the guy asking the question in that comic had the phrasing messed up such that the "right" answer doesn't even make any sense.
 * Raymond Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book? includes puzzles which take the reader to an island of Knights and Knaves. One puzzle reads: "This time you come across just one inhabitant lazily lying in the sun. You remember that his first name is either Edwin or Edward, but you cannot remember which. So you ask him his first name and he answers 'Edward.' What is his first name?" Answer:
 * If two's company, and three's a crowd, what are four and five? Answer:
 * Or you could say.
 * What is the difference between here and there? Answer:
 * What is the beginning of eternity, and the end of time and space? Answer:
 * Alternatively, you can add on "The beginning of every end, and the end of every race."

How is this situation possible?'

 * Two girls look exactly alike, they were born on the same day, to the same mother, within an hour of each other, but they are not twins. How is this possible? Answer:
 * If you hadn't specified "within an hour of each other":
 * Jennifer is 20 years old in 1980, but 15 years old in 1985. How? Answer:
 * Alternatively,
 * A cowboy rides into town on Friday. He stays three days, then rides out of town on Friday. How? Answer:
 * A cowboy rides into town on Friday. He stays three days, then rides out of town on Friday. How? Answer:

Which of these two weighs more?

 * The most common form of the question is "A pound of gold or a pound of feathers"? The question is designed to play on the listener's inherent association of gold being heavier than feather. Standard Solution: However, not all examples are that easy to decipher. One standard solution subversion:
 * Alternatively,
 * A standard way of playing it for laughs is answering "Drop them on your toes, and you'll find out.".
 * Inside Man has the bank robber ask the question of which weighs more: "all the trains that pass through Grand Central Station in a year - or the trees cut down to print all U.S. currency in circulation?" They think its the former once they figure out the U.S. currency part but one of the cops is smart enough to recall the robber said it was a trick question and the answer is always  before deducing both answers
 * When Jerry rhetorically asks Danny this question in Nukees, Danny points out, after some caveats, that a pound of lead would displace less air, and therefore weigh more.

What kind of bear were they hunting?
"Dwight: A hunter-
 * A group of hunters chases a bear 1 mile south, then 1 mile east, then 1 mile north. Now they're back where they started. What kind of bear were they hunting?.
 * In The Office, this was one of the questions Dwight tried to confound the new guy with, but he has also read a lot of Mind Trap so he answers the each question nearly instantly.
 * In The Office, this was one of the questions Dwight tried to confound the new guy with, but he has also read a lot of Mind Trap so he answers the each question nearly instantly.
 * In The Office, this was one of the questions Dwight tried to confound the new guy with, but he has also read a lot of Mind Trap so he answers the each question nearly instantly.
 * In The Office, this was one of the questions Dwight tried to confound the new guy with, but he has also read a lot of Mind Trap so he answers the each question nearly instantly.

Ryan: It's a.

Dwight: DAMMIT!"


 * A variant: you live in a house. All four walls face south. You look out the window and see a bear. What color is the bear?
 * Niven and Barnes's Dream Park sequel The California Voodoo Game uses this as the basis for a really tough logic puzzle. The measurements are the same, but the hunter runs down a bird instead of shooting a bear.
 * A variant is used during the Riddler's introduction in The Batman, combining this with the "That's Impossible" type above: "A hunter walks one mile north of his camp and spots a bear. He tracks the bear one mile east, shoots the bear, then goes one mile south to arrive at his camp. What color is the bear?" Detective Yin, who has been working on the puzzles with Batman's remote help to this point, is about to enter  as the answer, when