4 Riddles That Challenge Your Critical Thinking
Riddles are always fun to do, and when you get them right it makes you feel like you’ve just won a nobel prize!
As fun as riddles are, did you know they are also incredibly beneficial for your critical thinking abilities? Riddles are meant to make your brain turn, to think and to see beyond the question itself. That means by practicing and guessing riddles, you are also actively training your brain to think outside the box.
To get you started on that gray matter workout, here are 4 riddles you can decipher to help you warm up. Just don’t peek at the answers before you try them out yourself!
1. 3 doors
There are 3 doors to choose from. You must enter one of them. Behind the first door is a room full of landmines and explosives. Behind the second door is a pack of lions that haven’t eaten in 2 years. Behind the third door is a room full of venomous snakes. Which one do you choose?
Answer:
The 2nd door because the lions are already dead.
Critical Thinking:
When it comes to this situation, you will think about the possibilities upon entering each door. Explosives will be the first one out as those are dangerous live ammunition, which leaves the room of lions and snakes. The trick to the question is that it specifically states that these lions have been starving for 2 years whereas it does not give further information on the snakes. With a little bit of putting 2 and 2 together, you will come to the realization that an animal cannot survive without eating for 2 years, therefore the lions are dead and it is the safest room out of the 3.
2.Truth or lie
You are a prisoner in a room with 2 doors and 2 guards. One of the doors will guide you to freedom and behind the other is a hangman–you don’t know which is which. One of the guards always tells the truth and the other always lies. You don’t know which one is the truth-teller or the liar either. However both guards know each other. You have to choose and open one of these doors, but you can only ask a single question to one of the guards.
What do you ask to find the door leading to freedom?
Answer:
“If I asked what door would lead to freedom, what door would the other guard point to?”
Critical Thinking:
This question is the only one that will always lead to the right answer. If you asked the truth-guard, they would tell you that the liar-guard would point to the door that leads to death. Likewise, if you asked the liar-guard, they would tell you that the truth-guard would point to the door that leads to death. Therefore, no matter who you ask, the guards will tell you which door leads to death, and therefore you can pick the other door. This riddle highly challenges your critical thinking skills in order to reach this conclusion as to asking a question that will ultimately end in the same answer.
3. Light it up
If you were alone in a dark room, with only one match and an oil lamp, a fireplace, and a candle to choose from, which would you light first?
Answer:
The match.
Critical Thinking:
Most people would choose one of the three provided answers. However it is inaccurate and is meant as a red herring. With a little bit of out of the box thinking, you would realize that regardless of what you choose to burn and utilize as a source of light, you must always light the match first; even if it was not explicitly presented as a potential choice to the answer.
4. A riddle in time
What occurs twice in every moment, once in every minute, but also never, ever in a hundred thousand years?
Answer:
The letter “M.”
Critical Thinking:
Upon hearing this question, the mind will automatically correlate the question and answer with something to do based on time. However, this is just a misdirection and the actual answer is actually much simpler and lies in plain sight of the question itself. To solve this, you must think outside the box in the sense that you must first think further than the concept of time for this question, but rather look deeply into the context and the wording of the question itself.
Riddle me this
The fun thing about riddles is that there are so many to be discovered and solved. These riddles provided are just some of the more famous yet difficult ones. If you had fun giving your brain a little workout with this article, consider reading some of our other blogs on our website!
