A Riddle To Tell Your Friendly Gatherings
A Riddle To Tell Your Friendly Gatherings
When we were living in Zhengzhou, where I had come to teach English (like Tim Walz did), our friends invited us to banquets where we would sit at a round table that sat as many as 10 to 20 people. We were considered special guests and never allowed to pay or even contribute to the cost. Every guest was expected to take a turn to do something to entertain the rest at the table – sing a song, or tell a story, or do a magic trick, or tell a riddle or whatever else would entertain the rest.
I would either sing a song (like Autumn Leaves in both English and French) or tell a riddle. My good friend who was always there and was bilingual would translate the riddle for the rest. This riddle that I told almost always stumped everyone at the table. Keep in mind that it was told, not written, so when you read the last question I want to know if you knew the answer WITHOUT HAVING TO GO BACK to read it again, something that when you tell it nobody would be able to do.
The Riddle
"You are the pilot of an American Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 airplane flying from New York’s JFK Airport to the Lester B. Pearson International Airport at Toronto, Ontario. Lester B. Pearson was a former Prime Minister of Canada who was instrumental in the creation of the UN peacekeeping force. There are five staff aboard the plane: pilot, co-pilot, one male flight attendant and three female flight attendants, one of whom is a dead-ringer for Marilyn Monroe, and there are 121 passengers in economy seating and 11 in first class. The plane flies at 37,000 feet above ground at around 800 kilometers per hour and it takes less than an hour between taking off and landing. It is too short a flight for a movie to be shown, but as it is lunchtime, a light lunch is served that is a choice between a mixed salad or a Burger King hamburger. The passengers are also entitled to a drink and may choose from among water, milk, CocaCola or diet GingerAle, but would have to pay a little for wine or beer. The flight is without incident, and it lands on time."
(For my telling it to the audiences I did of course use Air China instead of American Airlines, and Chinese cities instead of North American ones, and changed other particulars to what they would have been familiar with.)
Now for the riddle question. "The flight attendants are all under the age of 30, the co-pilot is 42 years old. How old is the pilot?"
See my first comment for the answer.
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By this time I'll bet most of you have gone back to the beginning and seen that the answer was in the very first four words of the riddle, it is YOUR age.
You would most likely never have guessed it because of all the intervening erroneous information that would have taken your mind off the first few words. You might have thought about the problems with the Boeing 737 Max, or the flight particulars about speed and distances, or pictured Marilyn Monroe, or a hamburger, or what drink YOU would have ordered, all kinds of information that would have led you astray.
Now try it on YOUR friends and family. I would be willing to bet that almost NOBODY would be able to get the answer if the riddle were told out loud, and not written.
And please let me know if you enjoyed this article by either voting it up at the top of the article or posting a comment. Some of you might even honestly admit that you actually were unable to answer it.
I missed it!
I immediatly thought that somehow we would be deliberately mislead because there was really much too much extraneous information given.
One of the clever way this was made to be so difficult was the fact that the answer was contained at the very beginning! (If it was even near the beginning it might have been easier).....
But its usally a safe assumption that the answer might be near the beginning or not.. but certaining not at the very beginning!
That is one of the reasons why this riddle works so well. It is bound to work almost all the time.
Many people on social media sites seem to always try to impress others. And while there is personal information I do not want to share online, well I don't care if I admit a mistake. Do I care if people know I've been wrong?
Well, as Humphrey Bogart said in The Battleship Potemkin:
Frankly my dear I don't give a damn!
Well, I am one of the few members here who will actually openly apologize and admit that another was right, because I'm honest and have personal integrity. How many members here have you seen do that? Most will just bitch if they feel they've been wronged by the moderators. I'm sure a lot of members have read through the riddle but don't have the balls to admit that they didn't get it. YOU DID admit that you missed it, which is one of the reasons why you are one of my most favourite members on this site, but then of course you were the first friend I had on NewsVine, and I always considered you my mentor there.
Is that what's known as a "mixed message"?
good one.
Thank you JR.