Lateral thinking is a faculty that requires your imagination, your creative faculties and your intellectual faculties to be put to use effectively. The puzzles given below should be regarded as food to your thought and must be discussed among the members of a group. You must try to weave a credible story. The purpose of the puzzles is realized only if you come out with more possible solutions for each of them. The solution given under each puzzle is only one of the possibilities and is not to be regarded as unique.
01
A man lives on the twelfth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator -- or if it was raining that day -- he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the tenth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to his apartment.
(Solution: The man is a dwarf. He can't reach the upper elevator buttons, but he can ask people to push them for him. He can also push them with his umbrella.)
02
In the middle of the ocean is a yacht. Several corpses are floating in the water nearby.
(Solution 1: A group of people were on an ocean voyage in a yacht. One day, they decided to go swimming -- they put on their swimsuits and dove off the side. They discovered belatedly that they have forgotten to put a ladder down the side of the yacht and were unable to climb back in, so they drowned.)
(Solution 2: The same situation, but they set out a ladder that was just barely long enough. When they dove into the water, the boat, without their weight, rose slightly in the water, putting the ladder just out of reach.)
03
A man is lying dead in a room. There is a large pile of gold and jewels on the floor, a chandelier attached to the ceiling, and a large open window.
(Solution: The room is the ballroom of an ocean liner which sank some time ago. The man ran out of air while diving in the wreck.)
04
A man and his wife raced through the streets. They stopped, and the husband got out of the car. When he came back, his wife was dead, and there was a stranger in the car.
(Solution: The wife was about to have a baby. They drove to the hospital. The husband left to get a wheelchair, but the baby was born in the meantime, and the wife didn't survive the birth.)
05
A body is discovered in a park in Chicago in the middle of summer. It has a fractured skull and many other broken bones, but the cause of death was hypothermia.
(Solution: A poor peasant from somewhere in Europe desperately wants to come to the United States. Lacking money for airfare, he stows away in the landing gear compartment of a jet. He dies of hypothermia in mid-flight and falls out when the compartment opens as the plane makes its final approach.)
06
A woman has incontrovertible proof in court that her husband was murdered by her sister. The judge declares, "This is the strangest case I've ever seen. Though it's a cut-and-dried case, this woman cannot be punished."
(Solution: The sisters are Siamese twins.)
07
A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, "Thank you," and walks out.
(Solution: The man has hiccups; the bartender scares them away by pulling a gun.)
08
A hunter aimed his gun carefully and fired. Seconds later, he realized his mistake. Minutes later, he was dead.
(Solution 1: It was winter. He fired the gun near a snowy cliff, which started an avalanche.)
(Solution 2: He shot an elephant with a low caliber rifle. The bullet not being powerful enough to kill it, the elephant became enraged and trampled the hunter.)
09
A man is returning from Switzerland by train. If he had been in a non-smoking car he would have died.
(Solution: The man used to be blind -- he's returning from an eye operation which restored his sight. He spent all his money on the operation, so when the train (which had no internal lighting) goes through a tunnel, he thinks he's gone blind again and decides to kill himself. But before he could do it, he saw the light of the cigarettes people were smoking and realized he could still see.)
10
A man goes into a restaurant, orders albatross, eats one bite, and kills himself.
(Solution: The man, his wife, and a second man were in a ship that was wrecked on a desert island. The man's wife died in the wreck. When there was no food left, the second man brought what he said was an albatross but was really part of the dead wife. Later they were rescued, and at some point, the first man decides to order albatross at a restaurant. It tastes nothing like what he was told was albatross on the island, which makes him realize he really ate his wife. Unable to cope with the realization, he kills himself.)
11
A man is found hanging in an otherwise empty locked room with a puddle of water under his feet.
(Solution: He stood on a block of ice to hang himself.)
12
A man is dead in a puddle of blood and water on the floor of an otherwise empty locked room.
(Solution: He stabbed himself with an icicle.)
13
A man is lying dead, face down in the desert. He's wearing a backpack.
(Solution: He jumped out of an airplane, but his parachute failed to open.)
14
A man is lying dead, face down in the desert. There's a match near his outstretched hand.
(Solution: He was with several others in a hot air balloon, crossing the desert. The balloon was punctured, and they began to lose altitude. They tossed all their non-essentials overboard and then their clothing and food, but they were still sinking too fast. They drew matches to see who would jump over the side and save the others. This man lost.)
15
A man is driving his car. He turns on the radio, listens for five minutes, turns around, goes home, and shoots his wife.
(Solution: The radio program is one of those shows where they call up someone at random and ask them a question. The announcer states the name and town of the man's wife as the person he would call next. He does so, and a male voice answers. From this, he gathered his wife was having an affair.)
16
A man is driving his car. He turns on the radio, then pulls over to the side of the road and shoots himself.
(Solution: He's a DJ at a radio station and decides he wants to kill his wife. To establish his alibi, he puts a prerecorded record on the air, quickly drives home and kills her. On the way back, he turns on his show and discovers the record is skipping.)
17
The music stops, and a woman dies.
(Solution: The woman is a tightrope walker in a circus. Her act consists of walking the rope blindfolded, accompanied by music, without a net. The conductor is supposed to stop the music when she reaches the end of the rope, signaling that it's safe to step off onto the platform. That day, the usual conductor was ill. The substitute stopped the music early.)
18
A man is dead in a room with a small pile of wood chips and sawdust in the corner.
(Solution: The man is a blind dwarf, the shortest one in the circus. Another dwarf, jealous because he's not as short, has been sawing small pieces off the other's cane every night. When he uses his cane each morning, it appears to him that he's grown taller. Since his only income is from being a circus midget, he decides to kill himself when he gets too tall.)
19
There's a flash of light, and a man dies.
(Solution 1: The man is struck by lightning.)
(Solution 2: The man is a lion-tamer, posing for a photo with his lions. The lions react badly to the flash of the camera, and the man is momentarily blinded by it, so he gets mauled.)
20
A rope breaks. A bell rings. A man dies.
(Solution 1: A blind man enjoys walking near a cliff and uses the sound of a buoy to gauge his distance from the edge. One day the buoy's anchor rope breaks, allowing the buoy to drift away from the shore. When it rings, the man thinks he's further away from the edge than he is, walks over it, and falls to his death.)
(Solution 2: The man is a bell ringer. One day the rope breaks, and he falls down the shaft and dies.)
