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Stock Lateral Thinking Puzzle/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

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Stock Lateral Thinking Puzzle/Headscratchers (view source)

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** There are variants of this puzzle in other countries. I've heard 'I have two coins that add up to 55c, and one is not a 50 cent coin' in Australia.
** There is a ten cent and twenty cent coin in Australia. Also, I heard the above question before, my reponse was "I'd go to another country and learn their currency cause there damn ain't any two coins that could make fifty-five cents here".
** Also, according to [[The Other Wiki]], the United States did mint 20-cent coins in the 1870s. It didn't last very long (only a few years), but it was still a valid unit of currency. [[wikipedia:Twenty-cent piece chr(28)United States coinchr(29coin)|Here's a link.]]
 
* How many people are driving the bus? What the hell kinda stupid question is that?!
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* I know saying "these puzzles make no sense" is a pretty stock complaint, but hear this one. The "question":
{{quote| Tim and Greg were talking. Tim said, "The terror of flight." Greg said, "The gloom of the grave." Greg was arrested.}}
:: And the expected answer:
{{quote| {{spoiler|Greg is a German spy during World War II. Tim, an American, is suspicious of him, so he plays a word-association game with him. When Tim says, "The land of the free," Greg says, "The home of the brave." When Tim says, "The terror of flight," Greg says, "The gloom of the grave." Any U.S. citizen would know the first verse of the national anthem, but only a spy would have memorized the third.}}}}
:: If you highlight the spoiler, you know what the problem is. So how is that the "best" answer for this puzzle?
** [[Second Verse Curse|We have a trope that covers this]]. To be fair, [[Conviction by Contradiction|it is entirely possible that]] {{spoiler|Greg is looking for spies too, and he could claim the same rationale Tim had for knowing the 3rd verse.}}
 
* Okay, sorry for the short interval between two similar points but... here's another from the same source:
{{quote| A car without a driver moves; a man dies.}}
:: The expected answer:
{{quote| {{spoiler|The murderer sets the car on a slope above the hot dog stand where the victim works. He wedges an ice block in the car to keep the brake pedal down, puts the car in neutral, and flies to another city to avoid suspicion. It's a warm day; when the ice melts, the car rolls down the hill and kills the hot dog man.}}}}
:: And my guess:
{{quote| A man stops his car to fix it, but while he's under it the handbrakes fail. The car moves over him.}}
:: Now read both answers and tell me: which one makes more sense? ''Especially'' considering Occam's Razor and the fact that the original question does not mention anything that could lead to a block of ice or hot dogs.
** To respond to those, multiple other questions and mention the "bear" puzzle on the main page, I'm reminded of Raymond Smullyan's comment that someone could bring a brown bear up to the north pole just to make the question harder. We need to realize that these puzzles are less about making sense and more about trying to confuse readers until we figure out what they were thinking.
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