So you’ve heard this one before…
Teaching March 18th. 2008, 10:16pmI was finished with my lesson with my upper level class, and I wanted to see if they’d enjoy a riddle. Here is the riddle I gave them.
“A man lives in a tall building. Every day he rides the elevator down to the bottom floor to go to work. When it’s a sunny day, he returns, takes the elevator half way up the apartment building, and walks the rest of the way up on the stairs. On rainy days, he takes the elevator all the way up. Why?”
Believe it or not, one of my students solved this riddle before I had finished explaining it to the rest of the class. He said he had heard a variant of it and knew how to solve it immediately. Seeing as I wanted this riddle to last at least five minutes, I was shocked he got this material right away.
I needed to give the class another riddle and hope he hadn’t seen it before. Here is my second riddle.
“A woman was in a room. The radio in the room went off. The woman died. Why?”
This one was much tougher. I wrote the sentences down, and let them try to make grammatically correct statements to solve the riddle, but it wasn’t till I gave them a few hints that someone guessed to correct answer. The students thought the answer to the question was amusing, but “dark.” Whatever. It ate up a few minutes of time. I should squirrel away a few more riddles in case I need to do this again in a class.
4 Responses to “So you’ve heard this one before…”
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March 18th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Solutions to both puzzles will be posted tomorrow. Make your guesses now!
March 19th, 2008 at 7:16 am
The first one is easy – I heard this when I was about 10 years old. The second one however has stumped me and a turning to google only led me to this blog.
March 19th, 2008 at 7:52 am
The first one I know – did I tell you it?
Was the woman blind and there was a power cut? She thought she had also gone deaf so killed herself?
March 19th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Answer 1:
Man is a midget. On sunny days, he can’t reach the top button on the elevator. He pushes it with an umbrella on a rain day.
Answer 2:
Woman is on a respirator in a hospital. The power goes out. The radio dies as a result of the power failure. The woman’s life support machine fails too. She dies.