A large truck had become wedged under an underpass. The driver couldn’t move it backward or forward, and traffic was beginning to back up behind it.

He was on the point of desperation when a little boy approached him and offered a suggestion. A few minutes later the truck was on its way. What did the boy tell the driver?

In the dusty street of an Old West mining town, a classics professor was stunned to find a post bearing this inscription:

TOTI
EHORS
ESTO

What was the post for?

If you start at the North Pole and walk one mile south, one mile east, and one mile north, you’ll find yourself back at your starting point.

The North Pole is not the only point with this property on Earth’s surface. In fact, there are any number of such points. Where are they?

I am greater than God, and more evil than the devil. Poor people have me. Rich people want me. And if you eat me, you’ll die. What am I?

Suppose you put a coin into an empty bottle and then insert a cork in the bottle’s opening. How could you retrieve the coin without breaking the bottle or pulling out the cork?

Another puzzle from Henry Ernest Dudeney:

“In the illustration Professor Rackbrane is seen demonstrating one of the little posers with which he is accustomed to entertain his class. He believes that by taking his pupils off the beaten tracks he is the better able to secure their attention, and to induce original and ingenious methods of thought. He has, it will be seen, just shown how four 5’s may be written with simple arithmetical signs so as to represent 100. Every juvenile reader will see at a glance that his example is quite correct. Now, what he wants you to do is this: Arrange four 7’s (neither more nor less) with arithmetical signs so that they shall represent 100. If he had said we were to use four 9’s we might at once have written 99 9/9, but the four 7’s call for rather more ingenuity. Can you discover the little trick?”

How can you put 10 lumps of sugar into three cups so there is an odd number of lumps in each cup?

The following riddles have the same answer. What is it?

• Scotland: “What is it that hangs high, and cries sore, has a head and no hair?”
• Wales: “I saw some object near to a town, in a very finely made palace between earth and heaven. It has a fine tail which almost reaches to the ground, and its tongue hangs in a very large skull. It spends most of its time in silence, but sometimes it calls its friends together.”
• France: “The more one pulls it, the more it cries out.”
• Lithuania: “A horse with a silver tail neighs on a high hill.”
• Serbia: “A dead mare doesn’t neigh, but when somebody pulls it by the tail, it neighs so that all men can hear it.”
• Newfoundland: “Round as a hoop, deep as a pail, never sings out till it’s caught by the tail.”
• Chile: “Señora Carolina likes to live in a high house, and if they pull her feet, she disturbs the inhabitants.”