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. If you have two coins totaling 11p, and one of the coins is not a penny, what are the two coins?

3. 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?

4. 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.

5. Which side of a cat contains the most hair?

6. 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?

7. How many birthdays does a typical woman have?

8. Why can't a man living in Canterbury be buried west of the River Stour?

9. Divide 40 by half and add ten. What is the answer?

10. To the nearest cubic centimetre, how much soil is there in a 3m x 2m x 2m hole?

11. Is it legal for a man to marry his widow's sister?

12. 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 colour are the driver's eyes?

13. 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?

14. 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.

15. The band of stars across the night sky is called the "...... Way"?

16. Yogurt is made from fermented........

17. What do cows drink?

18. A farmer has 15 cows, all but 8 die. How many does he have left?

19. 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?

20. If the hour hand of a clock moves 1/60th of a degree every minute, how many degrees will it move in an hour?

21. How many hands does the clock of the tower of Big Ben have?

22. How many degrees are there between clock hands at 3.15 p.m.?

23. How many times do the hands of a clock overlap in 24 hours?

24. John's mother has 3 children, one is named April, one is named May. What is the third one named?

25. You are running in a race. You overtake the second person. What position are you in?

26. In the same race, if you overtake the last person, then you are in what position?

27. 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?

28. 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?

30. 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?

31. 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?

32. You have to choose between three rooms.
The first is full of raging fires
The second is full of tigers that haven’t eaten for 3 years.
The third is full of assassins with loaded machine guns.
Which room should you choose?

33. 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?

34. Name three consecutive days in English without using the words Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday

35. 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.

36. Join all the 9 dots on the upright 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. 10p and 1p - the other coin can be a penny!

3. The match!

4. Holes

5. The outside

6. Churchill was Prime Minister twice, from 1940 to 45 and from 1951 to 55.

7. One

8. Because he is still alive.

9. Dividing by half is the same as multiplying by 2.

10. None - it's a hole!

11. No – because he's dead.

12. The colour of your eyes.

13. The woman is of small stature and couldn't reach the upper lift buttons.

14. He was cleaning the inside of the windows.

15. MilkyWay

16. Milk

17. Water. After the previous two questions, did you answer milk?

18. Eight

19. About 1 to 1. Any birth will always have a 50% chance of being male or female.

20. One

21. Eight: there are four faces to the clock of the tower of Big Ben (now officially called Elizabeth Tower). See the picture to the upright.

22. 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 p.m. and 4 p.m.. 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.

23: the minute hand will go round the dial 24 times, but the hour hand will also complete two circuits. 24 minus 2 equals 22.

24. John

25. If you overtake the second person then you become second.

26. You can't overtake the last person in a race!

27. Cut it horizontally half way up (i.e. parallel to the top).See upright

28. House numbers.

29. The doctor was his mother. Going full circle, this is very similar to the first question.

30. 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.

31. The second room. Tigers that haven’t eaten in three years are dead!

33. 32. Pour the juice from the second glass into the fifth.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

34. The letter e doesn't appear once in the paragraph.

35. 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.

Score

Over 33. You are a true lateral thinking Guru. Edward De Bono would be proud of you. O rmay be you are the man himself.

28 to 32. Very good.

21 to 27. Quite good.

15 to 20. Average.

Under 15 - watch The Matrix, The Simpsons and Dr. Who a few more times.