Monday, November 3, 2008

Riddle #29: Water and Milk

You have two buckets: one is completely filled with water and one is completely filled with milk. Your goal is to fill each bucket with one half water and one half milk. When you are done, each bucket needs to be completely filled -- you cannot lose any of the liquid in this task. What makes this task difficult is this: You are not allowed pour the liquid into any other container. (And before you ask, no you cannot hold any liquid in your mouth and then spit it out.)

How do you complete this task?

The answer to this riddle has been guessed. To read it, see the comments section.

Lateral Thinking Puzzlers by Paul Sloane has lots of classic riddles, clues and answers. Click here to order it.

2 comments:

  1. How about this? You freeze the contents of each bucket. Remove the frozen water or milk. You would then cut the the frozen liquid in half. When you have done this with each you replace 1/2 frozen water and 1/2 frozen milk in each of the buckets. When they thaw you will have a 2 buckets that are filled with 1/2 water and 1/2 milk. (Because of the shape of the bucket I would suggest a vertical cut to ensure you have maintained the 1/2 measurement all the way down, from top to bottom.

    David Brollier

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  2. David, you are correct! Good job.

    ReplyDelete