Someone sent me these. With these types of questions, I thought about putting this in IMHO. But I’m hoping that there are indisputable answers:
A penniless sculptor made a beautiful metal statue which he sold. Because of this he died soon afterward. Why?
The body of a climber is found many years after his death 1000 ft below the summit of one of the world’s highest mountains. In his pocket is a diary claiming that he had reached the summit and was on his way down. How was it discovered that he was not telling the truth?
I know the answer to 1 is that he melted down the lightning rod of his house and was killed by a lightning strike. I’ve heard the second one before too … but I don’t recall the answer…
Well, let’s see. The sculptor might’ve made a statue out of a radioactive metal, and died soon afterwards… it’s not clear to me that he died because of the selling, given the structure of the sentences.
As for the climber … is he freeclimbing? I mean, if he were using pitons, or the like, there would be a lack of them above the point where he died…
About the climber… I’m not familiar with the rate that snow accumulates on mountain-tops, but it may be possible that (if the rate is slow enough) his footprints simply stopped before reaching the top?
The climber wrote in pen, but if he made it to the top, the pen would have been useless by the time he reversed and started to head down and record his notes.
I should be more specific with my pen answer with this crowd: He - the climber - wrote in fountain pen, which would not write at the summit or anywhere near it.
There are other puzzles similar to these (none of which I’m too thrilled about).
Things like “The man couldn’t go home because the man with the mask was there.” I’m NOT going to bother to put the answer in a spoiler box:
it’s a baseball game. The man is a runner and he can’t go home (home plate) because the catcher (wearing a catcher’s mask) is there.
A man is found dead in the middle of a scorching desert. Every bone in his body is broken. No tire tracks or footprints are anywhere near the body. Besides suffering the broken bones his other medical problem is severe frostbite. What happened?
He stowed away in the wheel well of a jet airliner which flew to about 30,000 feet (where the temperature was cold enough to cause frostbite), then, somehow he lost his grip, passed out (or whatever) and fell 30,000 feet to his death in that desert. (Almost sounds like the stuff of Urban Legends).
These seem to belong to the other 2 puzzles which were posted. (I think there’s another one about “the haystack saved someone’s life”).
Anyone have further information on the source of these? (Seems like something from DeBono’s Lateral Thinking Course from about a decade ago).
This is not really a thread hijack. I just want to pursue this matter further.
Okay, I answered my own question (sort of). Go to Google and do an exact search on “the haystack was important”.
I didn’t have time to investigate sculpting lightning rods though.
These problems seem to have something to do with the “A-Ha” experience.
Seems like the “answers” are based on assumptions with little relevance to the original scenario. We could come up with all sorts of answers since we’re all just making stuff up.
He was penniless because he used up all his pennies. He died because he forgot to take his insulin shot.
As for the fountain pen not writing, how would 1000 ft make that much difference? If he was already a mear 1000 ft from the summit, then he would be several thousand feet above sea level (it was one of the highest mountains, remember). I think it’s because he is not left handed.
A fountain pen would have leaked in his pocket as the ambient pressure dropped, but since the riddle doesn’t stipulate a fountain pen, I wonder if we can assume it.
How about that there was something so noteworthy at the summit that, had he been there, he could certainly have mentioned in his diary?
Or his oxygen bottle was not used.
Or, just after the claim in the diary, he also wrote the words “not really”.
Ugh. I remember doing these in “Math Olympiads” class through my middle school PACT program (i.e. MENSA for preteens). We would spend one day a week, EVERY week doing these “exercises” rather than actually learning anything new about math.
Indisputable answers? Hardly! Here are some other possibilities:
The sculpture was a nude with a face immediately recognizable as the wife of a notorious Mafia don.
He was penniless from spending too much on drugs, and when he got more money he went on a binge and OD’d.
He had found a a bunch of berylium copper scrap in the an alley dumpster and cast a statue out of it (that’s even more lethal than zinc, and less likely to give you so sick you stagger out of the room before an overdose!).
Because he was found with the flag he intended to plant at the summit.
The diary was written in a kind of ink that only made it to the market years after he set out on his expedition, proving the diary had been planted.
He still had a complete set of freeze dried food packets on him from where he had set out from a camp with other people the day before he died.
