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Tricky Lateral Thinking Puzzles - Solutions

Solution for #1

Alternate Solution #1

Kids are getting their pictures taken with Santa.

Alternate Solution #2

The man is a doctor, and the woman is a nurse who is giving the children injections.

Solution for #2

It was an airplane cabin; the plane crashed into the mountain.

Solution for #3

He's a priest -- he's marrying them to other people, not to himself.

Solution for #4

The island is a traffic island.

Solution for #5

The husband had killed himself some time ago; the wife was looking at his ashes in an urn on the mantelpiece.

Solution for #6

A baseball game is going on. The base-runner sees the catcher waiting at home plate with the ball, so decides to stay at third base to avoid being tagged out.

Solution for #7

The man was an amateur mechanic, the book is a Volkswagen service manual, the beetle is a car, and the pile of bricks is what the car fell off.

Solution for #8

The Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility and will likely remain there for the foreseeable future.

Solution for #9

It's a wolf pack; they killed him.

Solution for #10

The dead man is Superman; the rock is Green Kryptonite.

Solution for #11

Bruce is a horse.

Solution for #12

This is a post-holocaust scenario of some kind; for whatever reason, the man believes himself to be the last human on Earth. He doesn't want to live by himself, so he jumps -- but when he hears the telephone ring, he realizes he's not the last human on Earth after all.

Solution for #13

The man walks into a casino and goes to the craps table. He bets all the money he owns, shoots craps, and loses. Now flat broke, he becomes despondent and commits suicide.

Solution for #14

It's nighttime. The one who looks around sees his own reflection in the window, but not his companion's. He realizes the other is a vampire.

Solution for #15

The "bicycles" are Bicycle playing cards; the man was cheating at cards, and when the extra card was found, he was killed by the other players.

Solution for #16

Charlie was an insect sitting on a chair. The music was being played for a game of musical chairs.

Solution for #17

Alternate Solution #1

It's a chess game -- knight takes pawn.

Alternate Solution #2

More of an alternate question than an alternate solution -- the problem could be stated this way instead: "Two monks sit in a tower. The queen kills the king. The monks shake hands and part company." The answer, of course, is that the monks were playing chess, and one beat the other.

Solution for #18

It's a model train set.

Solution for #19

It's a game of Monopoly.

Solution for #20

George and Gracie are goldfish; their tank broke.

Solution for #21

Friday is a horse.

Solution for #22

Beulah and Craig were hurricanes.

Solution for #23

The native chief asked him, "What is the third baseman's name in the Abbott and Costello routine 'Who's on First'?" The man, who had no idea, said "I don't know," the correct answer. However, he was a big smart aleck, so if he had known the answer he would have pointed out that "What" was the second baseman's name. The chief, being quite humorless, would have executed him on the spot.

Solution for #24

The men have gone spelunking and have taken an Igloo cooler with them so they can have a picnic down in the caves. They cleverly used dry ice to keep their beer cold, not realizing that as the dry ice sublimed (went from a solid state to a vapor state) it would push the lighter oxygen out of the cave, and they would suffocate.

Solution for #25

He was a skywriter whose plane crashed into another plane.

Solution for #26

Mr. Black is a contestant on the game show Wheel of Fortune.

Solution for #27

The young woman is Dorothy, and the story is The Wizard of Oz.