Thursday, November 03, 2005

Thumb twiddling and web surfing

Yup, thats what I have been doing for a second day here at work....exciting times eh?

I did come across a really cool quiz - I've seen and done similar onces before, but I always like them. Gives my mind a challenge and wasted a few minutes of my time as I tried to work out the solution!

The background on the quiz is that Albert Einstein allegedly created it and said that only those with an intelligence quotient of 98 percentile and higher should be able to solve it. In my opinion anyone with time, patience and the ability to reason and logic should be able to solve this, although it might come after immense frustration! You need to work this out based on what you are told to find what you are not told. A good place to start is to create a table with five rows and six columns - the first column will contain the categories - Nationality, House Color, Drink, Cigar Type and Pet.

Here is the puzzle:

There are five men of different nationalities living in a row of five houses, each house being a different color. Each man drinks a different kind of drink, keeps a different kind of pet, and smokes a different kind of cigar.

The Brit lives in the red house.
The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
The Dane drinks tea.
The green house is to the left of the white house.
The owner of the green house drinks coffee.
The man who smokes Pall Mall keeps birds.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes Blends lives next to the man who keeps cats.
The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Who keeps the fish?


I was able to solve this one, although it did take some thinking over a few of the answers. A little bit of head scratching and a lot of re-reading the clues! Keep at it and good luck!

I'll post the answer in the comments section.....no cheating and looking ahead!!! I can not wait to see how long it takes everyone to solve this!

Bonne Chance!

2 comments:

Kimberly said...

Hi! Did you solve it? Or did you give up and look ahead for the answer? *grin*

The answer: The German has the Fish

Starting from the first house:

Norwegian, Yellow, Water, Dunhill Cats

Dane, Blue, Tea, Blends, Horses

Brit, Red, Milk, PallMall, Birds

German, Green, Coffee, Prince, Fish

Swede, White, Beer, Blue Master, Dog

To solve this I put down what I knew to determine what I did not know! I.e. The Norwegian lives in the first house and the Norwegian lives next to the blue house so the second house therefore is blue. The middle (third) house drinks milk. The green house is to the left of the white house and the owner of the green house drinks coffee. Since we know that there needs to be one house to the right of the green and the middle house is a milk drinker, the green house therefore is the fourth house and the white house is the fifth house. The Brit lives in the red house which is by default then the middle house and the Norwegian's house is yellow.

Jenny Moore said...

Woohoo! I did it! and it only took me 10 minutes....Now to see if my hubby is smart enough. lol.