Saturday, September 17, 2005

Brain teaser

During my last class yesterday, I did a little activity called the silly intelligence test. You know, full of questions like, "Some months have 31 days, how many months have 28?" And your first instinct is to say "one", but the answer is really 12. (They all have at least 28 days.) It's fun and tricky and a good way to end a Friday. Then just as we are wrapping things up, one of my students says this:

Three guys go into a bar and order three Heinekens. The waitress gets the beers and says $30. (This must be a New York bar considering the price.) The men pay and she goes to the register. The manager sees the waitress at the register and says, "Is that for those three guys?" And she says, "yeah." He tells her they are good customers and to give them five dollars back, they get the discount price. So the waitress is walking back to the guys and thinks, "How am I going to split the five bucks between three guys," and decides to put two bucks into her pocket and give back the men one dollar each. Which she does.

Now the men paid $9 each for their beers ($27) and the waitress put $2 into her pocket, so where is the other dollar?

Then she announced that she would have to check with her boyfriend for the answer and tell us next week. I thanked her for poisoning my mind.

It took me about 15 minutes on the bus ride home to figure it out.

Can you?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

ow. my brain.

Ace said...

the $27 is inclusive of the 2 dollars that the waitress pinched.

Heidi said...

Hi..First time visitor..I saw your comments on another blogger.. I'm also from Montreal and enjoying reading your entries.


Btw..Math was my worst..Couldn't figure this out.

r said...

tricky.

Great brain twister!

Anonymous said...

no missing dollar, 25 in register, 2 with waitress, 3 with beer drinkers

Unknown said...

Erm, yeah...they paid $25 not $27 surely, as the change was $5? But I'm very rubbish at maths so...

_Psycho said...

they paid 25$ not 27, because they have 3 box in the pocket and 2 in the waitress one, like chauncy said, yeah tricky for the brain indeed