Lateral Thinking Quiz

The following questions will test your ability to think laterally. If you get more
than 50% of these right you're certainly strong on your lateral thinking skills (or
maybe you're just good at quizzes!)
1. A graduate applying for pilot training with a major airline was asked what he
would do if, after a long-haul flight to Sydney, he met the captain wearing a dress
in the hotel bar. What would you do?
2. What can you hold in your right hand, but not in your left?
3. If you have two coins totaling 11p, and one of the coins is not a penny, what are
the two coins?
4. How many animals of each species did Moses take into the Ark?
5. A man built a rectangular house, each side having a southern view. He spotted a
bear. What colour was the bear?
6. If you were alone in a deserted house at night, and there was an oil lamp, a
candle and firewood and you only have one match, which would you light first?
7. What can you put in a wooden box that would make it lighter? The more of them
you put in the lighter it becomes, yet the box stays empty.
8. Which side of a cat contains the most hair?
9. The 60th and 62nd British Prime Ministers of the UK had the same mother and
father, but were not brothers. How do you account for this?
10. How many birthdays does a typical woman have?
11. Why can't a man living in Canterbury be buried west of the River Stour?
12. Divide 40 by half and add ten. What is the answer?
13. To the nearest cubic centimetre, how much soil is there in a 3m x 2m x 2m hole?
14. Is it legal for a man to marry his widow's sister?
15. If you drove a coach leaving Canterbury with 35 passengers, dropped off 6 and
picked up 2 at Faversham, picked up 9 more at Sittingbourne, dropped off 3 at
Chatham, and then drove on to arrive in London 40 minutes later, what would the
name of the driver be?
16. A woman lives on the tenth floor of a block of flats. Every morning she takes the
lift down to the ground floor and goes to work. In the evening, she gets into the
lift, and, if there is someone else in the lift she goes back to her floor directly.
Otherwise, she goes to the eighth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to her
flat. How do you explain this?
17. A window cleaner is cleaning the windows on the 25th floor of a skyscraper, when
he slips and falls. He is not wearing a safety harness and nothing slows his fall,
yet he suffered no injuries. Explain.
18. The band of stars across the night sky is called the "...... Way"?

19. Yogurt is made from fermented ........

20. What do cows drink?
21. A farmer has 15 cows, all but 8 die. How many does he have left?
22. If a red house is made of red bricks, and a blue house is made of blue bricks, what
is a green house made of?
23. In what sport are the shoes made of metal?
24. The Zorganian Republic has some very strange customs. Couples only wish to
have female children as only females can inherit the family's wealth, so if they
have a male child they keep having more children until they have a girl. If they
have a girl, they stop having children. What is the ratio of girls to boys in
Zorgania?
25. If a plane crashes on the Italian/Swiss border, where do you bury the survivors?
26. If the hour hand of a clock moves 1/60th of a degree every minute, how many
degrees will it move in an hour?
27. How many hands does the clock of Big Ben have?
28. How many degrees are there between clock hands at 3.15 pm?
29. How many times do the hands of a clock overlap in 24 hours?
30. John's mother has 3 children, one is named April, one is named May. What is the
third one named?
31. You are running in a race. You overtake the second person. What position are you
in?
32. In the same race, if you overtake the last person, then you are in what position?
33. A cowboy rode into town on Friday, spent one night there, and left on Friday. How
do you account for this?
34. How can you throw a ball as hard as you can, and make it stop and return to you,
without hitting anything and with nothing attached to it?
35. Using just ONE straight cut, how can you cut a rectangular cake into two equal
parts when a rectangular piece has already been removed from it?
36. A man went into a store to buy an item. He asked the assistant:
"How much does it cost for one?"
The assistant replied 2 pounds, Sir"
"And how much for 10?"
The assistant replied "4"
"How much for 100?"
He got the reply "6"
What was the man buying?
37. A man and his son were in a car crash. The father was killed and the son was
taken to hospital with serious injuries. The examining doctor exclaims: "But, this
is my son!"
How can this be?

38. There are 23 football teams playing in a knockout competition. What is the least
number of matches they need to play to decide the winner?
39. Sarah's father has five daughters. The oldest is called Lala, the next Lele, the third
Lili, the fourth Lolo. What is the fifth daughter's name?
40. You have to choose between three rooms.
The first is full of raging fires; the second is full of tigers that havent eaten in 3
years and the third is full of assassins with loaded machine guns.
Which room should you choose?
41. Three of the glasses below are filled with orange juice and the other three are
empty. By moving just one glass, can you arrange the glasses so that the full and
empty glasses alternate?

42. Name three consecutive days in English without using the

words Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday
43. What's unusual about this paragraph? Just how quickly you
can find out what is so funny about it. It looks fairly ordinary
and plain that you might think nothing is wrong with it. In
fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is highly curious though.
Study it and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you
work at it a bit, you could just find out.
44. Join all the 9 dots on the right using four straight lines or less, without lifting your
pen and without tracing the same line more than once. Do copy this onto paper if
you wish to make it easier.

Answers:
1. Offer to buy her a drink! The captain was of course a woman. Many airlines are now hot
on equal opportunities and a candidate who had difficulty envisaging that an airline
captain might be female would not go very far!
2. Your left hand, forearm or elbow.
3. 10p and 1p - the other coin can be a penny!
4. None. NOAH built the Ark
5. White. Only at the North Pole can all four walls be facing South.
6. The match!
7. Holes

8. The outside
9. Churchill was Prime Minister twice, from 1940 to 45 and from 1951 to 55.
10. One
11. Because he is still alive .
12. 90. Dividing by half is the same as multiplying by 2.
13. None - it's a hole!
14. No - because he's dead
15. YOU are the driver!
16. The woman is of small stature and couldn't reach the upper lift buttons.
17. He was cleaning the inside of the windows.
18. Milky Way
19. Milk
20. Water. After the previous two questions, did you answer milk?
21. Eight
22. Glass
23. Horse racing; or other horse sports
24. About 1 to 1. Any birth will always have a 50% chance of being male or female.
25. You don't bury survivors!
26. One
27. Eight: there are four faces to the clock of Big Ben (see the picture to the right)
28. Not zero degrees as you might at first think. The minute hand will be at 15 minutes (90
degrees clockwise from vertical) but the hour hand will have progressed to one quarter
of the distance between 3 pm and 4 pm. Each hour represents 30 degrees (360 / 12), so
one quarter of an hour equals 7.5 degrees. So the minute hand will be at 97.5
degrees: a 7.5 degree difference between the hands.
29. 22: the minute hand will go round the dial 24 times, but the hour hand will also
complete two circuits. 24 minus 2 equals 22.

30. John
31. If you overtake the second person then you become second.
32. You can't overtake the last person in a race!
33. His horse was named Friday.
34. Go outside and throw it upwards.
35. Cut it horizontally half way up (i.e. parallel to the top) . See
right
36. House numbers.
37. The doctor was his mother. Going full circle, this is very similar to the first question.
38. In a knockout competition, every team except the winner is defeated once and once
only, so the number of matches is one less than the number of teams in this case 23-1
= 22.
39. Sarah.
40. The second room. Tigers that havent eaten in three years are dead!
41. Pour the juice from the second glass into the fifth.
42. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
43. The letter e doesn't appear once in the paragraph.
44. Here is one possible solution. Of course you have to
go beyond the boundaries of the square of dots to
solve this.
Out of interest this particular puzzle is where the
expression "to think outside the box" originally
came from.