A man goes for a walk. A bell rings. He dies. What happened?
My kids were into these over the summer.
On the net, search for “lateral thinking” or “situation” puzzles.
ready29003, you are demonstrating the inherent difficulties of solving these sort of puzzles on a message board. The whole idea is to be able to ask yes or no questions repeatedly to solve the problem. You ask some good questions, but without the repeated interaction of constant questions and answers, the solution is a long way off.
As you are also seeing on this thread, we get a shortcut to the problem-solving process: others who already know the answer from solving (or hearing) these same puzzles in the past get to shout out the answer. That is the best we can hope for here.
astorian has correctly provided the answer about the guy with a ring found dead in the desert: he was skydiving and his parachute failed to open. The ring was from the parachute rip cord. According to JohnCocktoasten, this is also the answer to the two guys wearing the same thing. I have never heard this variation, but OK, I guess it works.
JohnCocktoasten also provides us with the correct answer to another one, although he has stated the wrong puzzle. He has answered the puzzle:
The music stops and a man dies. Why?
correctly by explaining it was a blind tightrope walker. The organist murdered him by ending the music when he was only halfway across the tightrope. Since he was blind, he judged when to step off the tightrope by the musical cues. However, the puzzle JohnCocktoasten stated this was an answer to was:
The lights went off and she died. which is a different puzzle. I still think this one is about a woman on a kidney dialysis machine. The power went out (thus causing the lights to go out) and when the power to her kidney dialysis machine went off, she died.
The other two I posted, about the man with a cane who shoots himself and the man with a cape who is arrested for murder are both long and complicated stories. The answers to your questions, ready29003, are “no.”
I’ll check back here in a couple of days, and if no one posts the correct answers maybe I’ll give in and tell.
Hmmm… a man goes for a walk… a bell rings… he dies… this one sounds vaugely familiar, but I can’t remember it… hmmmm…
Oh, i just wanted the situation puzzles and the answers. I would love to sit around and play these games with you, but you are right these message boards wouldn’t work for that.
I played a bunch of these with my kids last night! they love em, so do i.
So richardb…just give up the answers!! or not, thats ok.
thanks for all of em.!
I guess the reason I’ve always preferred my solution to ‘the lights went off and she died’ is the misdirection. The lights went off due to power failure but the power failure also caused the record player to stop and the tightrope walker to fall.
In fact, I like many of these precisely because of the misdirection. When you first hear about a man going home, a cabin in the woods, a naked man holding a straw and two guys entering the desert, your immediate mental picture is a house, a log cabin, a drinking straw and land based desert entries. Those mental images make it all the more difficult to ‘think outside the box’ as it were.
I agree that this forum makes guessing impossible. But for me, I like being the narrator and letting friends ‘play the game.’ If I have the setup and the solution, that’s all I need to field any yes/no questions they might pose…
They’re doing a ton of these over at the JREF forums. Click on “Puzzles”.