Tag Archives: Riddle

The Magical Wolf Island Riddle

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/12/14
Primary Language: English

This informant is a senior at USC in the Marshall School of Business.  He told me he had a riddle for me that he was asked in an interview for consulting, but then later said it could have been an investment banking interview as well he didn’t remember.

Out in the middle of the ocean there exists a magical island with only grass.  There are 120 wolves and 1 sheep on the island.  The wolves can live off the grass but they would rather eat sheep.  Every time a sheep is eaten that wolf turns into a sheep.  Now the wolf has to worry about being eaten by another wolf.  All the wolves are rational and smart and want to survive.  Given that there are 120 wolves and 1 sheep on the island, will the sheep be eaten?

The answer is: No the sheep will not be eaten.  This can be shown much simpler with smaller numbers.  If there is 1 wolf and 1 sheep the sheep will be eaten.  If there is 2 wolves and 1 sheep the sheep won’t be eaten, because each one knows the other will eat him right after.  So with this reasoning, whenever there is an even number of wolves on the island, the sheep won’t get eaten.

I definitely didn’t know the answer off the top of my head, but once I heard the answer it seemed like a pretty simple concept.  This shows how much people working in high finance value critical thinking and problem solving skills.

 

 

The Woodchuck Riddle

Nationality: Philippeano
Age: 21
Occupation: Student, Part time facilities attendant at on campus gym
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/27/13
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

I asked my informant to tell me a riddle or story he knew of:

 

Me: When did you hear this Riddle or Rhyme?

Informant: Fifth grade

Me: In Fifth grade… where?

Informant: Just, a teacher told me

Me: How does it go?

Informant: How much wood would a wood chuck chuck, if a wood chuck could chuck could?

Me: Could chuck… what?

Informant: Chuck Could, chuck… wood?

[laughter]

 

The fact that my informant learned this popular Rhyme as early as the fifth grade is testament to it’s longevity. It no doubt keeps its popularity since it remains hard to recite even for those who know it, such as my informant, who, still accidentally mispronounced the last word.

Humpty Dumpty

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/13
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Me: Can you tell me some familiar story or rhyme you remember?

Informant:       “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

                               Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,

                               All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,

                               Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

Me: When did you hear this?

Informant: “This nursery rhyme was something I heard in grade school.”

The informant thought of this rhyme first when prompted for a piece of folklore, and demonstrated that despite an inter-cultural upbringing, this rhyme still featured prominently in her childhood. It would seem the Mother Goose style nursery rhymes, of which this is one, have become globalized and are no longer a purely western phenomenon, since despite an international heritage, the informant still seemed to associate their childhood most strongly with this rhyme, and recited it in its traditional form.

Lawnmower Riddle

Nationality: American
Age: 59
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: 4/27/13
Primary Language: English

The informant describes a riddle about an old man and a lawnmower.  The informant explains that he heard this from a friend at work and found it a fun riddle that made him think outside of the box and left him unable to figure out the answer.  Below is a summary of the riddle:

A friend of mine has a father who is sixty-five and has mowed his own lawn for years and years and he has a gas-powered, push lawnmower.  He has lived at the same place, cut the same grass, and used the same lawnmower for years and years.  He began to complain that the lawnmower wasn’t working properly.  He used to be able to cut the grass on one tank of gas and now he had to fill the lawnmower up with gas before he could finish the job.  He took the lawnmower to a small engine repair shop in town and the shop gave a full tune up on the machine – new spark plug and general touch up.  He picked up the lawnmower and went back to weekly task of mowing the lawn but was quite frustrated because despite having spent money to tune it up, it still took a refill of gas before finishing.  The question is, what is wrong with the lawnmower? The answer to this riddle is that nothing had changed about the lawnmower, but what had changed was that the man was sixty-five years old and walking slower to cut the grass.  That explains why it took more gas.

This riddle is a classic example of a scenario that forces one to think outside of the box or normal thought patterns.  Riddles such as this one are quite common within the United States and around the world.  Their popularity most likely stems from individuals’ desire to prove their intelligence and ability to solve problems.  The riddle being about a man with a lawn and a lawnmower indicates that this riddle originated from a society that has lawnmowers and lawns to mow.  It is likely that a joke involving these two things would not exist in a society without lawns or grass.

Psychopath Tests

Nationality: Taiwanese-American
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: California
Performance Date: February 15, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

My friend one day decided to ask me these tests that he had heard circulating around the school. Supposedly, they were meant to determine how psychopathic you were. You weren’t supposed to know that they were tests for that, and you were supposed to treat it as a riddle. He was very interested in psychology, but he didn’t believe these tests were at all accurate indicators at all. To him, these were just jokes and pseudo-psychology that he intended to ask me just for fun. They were of no real significance to him other than to just know how I considered these problems and how I solved them. However, these tests started appearing after a presentation from the father of a girl who had died from the Columbine shootings. People were beginning to take them seriously, according to my friend.

These are riddles for you. I will give you a scenario and ask you a question. Do your best to answer it.

One day, you woke up from your sleep at 3 in the morning. You don’t know why you did, except you had a really bad feeling about it. It seems like you were having a nightmare because you were sweating feverishly. You decide that the room is too stuffy, so you decide to go out onto the balcony. You live in a pretty okay apartment. It’s not the best, but it’s affordable and it’s pretty comfortable for what it’s worth. You live on the 7th floor. Upon walking outside though, you find that yourself horrified. In looking down, you find that you are the witness to a murder. You see the assailant attacking an elderly man and stabbing him with a knife. It seemed like the assailant noticed you were there, even though he was on the ground floor. He whirls around and makes eye contact with you. You don’t wait. You stumble back into your room, fearing for your life. You noticed he was shaking his hand at you only by moving his wrists. You don’t know what that means.

What was the killer doing?

One day, there was this girl. She was a relatively pretty girl. She was not outstanding in terms of looks, but she was definitely acceptable. One day, her mother died. At the funeral, she saw a strange man that she had never seen before. He was handsome and was just her type. They made eye contact, and she thought she would swoon. The man of her dream had appeared at her mother’s funeral, and she had truly fallen in love. After the funeral was over, she asked everybody who the mysterious man was. However, nobody could help her. Despite having asked everybody, nobody knew who the mysterious man was. Nobody could provide her with contact information, whether it was a phone number, address, or even email address. A few days later, the girl’s sister died. The girl had killed her.

Why did the girl kill her sister?

Answers are posted below

I thought that these tests were truly foolish as well. It is highly unlikely that riddles alone are enough to determine who is psychopathic or not. Moreover, I do not have much of an interest in psychology. It interested me to know that people were taking the tests so seriously though. Perhaps it reveals the fear that people have of the insane, and just how much they wanted to know they were safe around other people. I don’t see it as anything more than simple riddles that are easily solvable with small bits of imagination. To others, however, these were essential questions to ask.

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