Short Riddles and Answers

Question: A rat is placed at the beginning of a maze and must make it to the end. There are four paths at the start that he has an equal chance of taking: path A takes 5 minutes and leads to the end, path B takes 8 minutes and leads to the start, path C takes 3 minutes and leads to the end, and path D takes 2 minutes and leads to the start.

What is the expected amount of time it will take for the rat to finish the maze?

Question: Mary and jack are newly weds and want to go on a ski trip... So jack starts planning. He books a flight for them to Colorado. When they get there Mary gets pushed off the cliff. There is a guy in Hawaii named Sam and he was reading the paper. He right away said the husband did it. How does he know? HINTS: they have never met in person, jack did not tell Sam, he was not guessing, and it did not say it in the news paper.

Question: A teacher decides to give a pop quiz one day but all of her students refuse to take the quiz thinking that the teacher will call off the quiz. She can give only one of these students a detention for skipping the quiz. All of the students know each other's names and if a student knows he/she is getting a detention they take the quiz.

How can she threaten her students with the single detention so they all take the quiz?

Question: Ants on a stick may only move left or right. If they bump into each other they bounce off of each other and immediately move in the opposite direction maintaining speed the entire time. The only time they change speed is when they fall off of the edge of the stick.

If 25 ants are randomly put on a 1 meter long stick moving 1 meter per second, what is the longest amount of time it could take for them to all fall off?

Question: There are 1600 people sitting around a circular table. The first person (person 1) has a sword and kills the second person then hands it to the next alive person (in this case person 3). Person 3 stabs person 4 and gives the sword to person 5. This goes on until person 1499 kills person 1500. Then person 1 kills person 3 and so on. This is repeated until there is only a single person remaining.

Who remains in the end?