One of the best ways to improve at lateral thinking is to practice with lateral thinking puzzles. Even if you do not get the answer, it’s an excellent exercise for your brain and shows you how lateral thinking works.
With that in mind, we’ve prepared five challenging lateral thinking puzzles (with answers) to help you practice thinking outside the box and reexamining situations or problems from a creative viewpoint.
But first, just a brief overview of what lateral thinking is.
What is lateral thinking?
Lateral thinking is a concept developed by the Maltese thinker and philosopher Edward de Bono.
He introduced this concept – along with its opposing but complementary idea, “vertical thinking” – in his 1973 book Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step.
Lateral thinking allows us to look at unique and complex situations and examine the problem from a unique and creative point of view.
When step-by-step linear (or “vertical”) thinking fails, lateral thinking takes over. Often logic fails us in more nuanced situations where we do not know the weight of each component piece of information.
We also often don’t know how those components feature in the solution. Lateral thinking allows us to discover solutions assessing those components less rigidly.
Top 5 lateral thinking puzzles (with answers)
To solve these lateral thinking puzzles (with answers), follows these steps:
- Read the question
- Think about the answer
- If you are stuck, scroll to the ‘Hints’ section
- Try to use some of the strategies above to ask questions about the situation and wording of the question.
Then, if you’re still stuck, head on down to the answer section and find out the solution.
Questions for lateral thinking puzzles (with answer)
Puzzle #1: man in the elevator
On the tenth floor of a high-rise building, there lives a man. This man hates walking.
He takes the elevator down to the ground floor of his building. He does this every day on his way to work.
But on his way home from work, he must take the elevator to the seventh floor and then walk the rest of the way, up the stairs, to the tenth to reach his apartment.
A reminder that this man hates walking. And a note that there is nothing wrong with either the building, its design, or the elevator or its design.
Why does the man walk to the tenth floor from the seventh and not take the elevator all the way up to his floor?
Puzzle #2: secret salaries
Ten individuals are sitting at a table talking about their jobs and salaries. They become curious about the average hourly wage for the group of them.
However, no one is comfortable disclosing exactly how much they make.
How would the group go about calculating the average hourly wage for all ten of them, with each of them able to keep their salary a secret?
You are allowed to use a calculator, and no one person can see the hourly wage of any other.
How can the calculation still be achieved while maintaining these exact conditions?
Puzzle #3: coin in a bottle
You possess three objects. A small coin. An empty wine bottle. And a cork.
Put the coin in the bottle. Put the cork in the neck.
How can you remove the coin from the bottle without breaking the bottle or removing the cork?
Puzzle #4: reaching for the key
There are two brothers named Noah and Milo. They live together. Both are very short. Both are very forgetful and frequently lose the key to their apartment.
To ensure they never forget, they hide the key on the top of the doorframe.
However, neither Milo nor Noah are tall enough to reach the key independently. Each needs the other to get the key down by standing on the shoulders of the other.
But, only one of them can reach the key on the shoulders of the other. Noah is significantly smaller than Milo. Milo is considerably bigger (and older).
Yet only when Milo stands on Noah’s shoulders is it possible to reach the key. Why?
Puzzle #5: half of a barrel
Two workers at a brewery are trying to determine if a barrel is more, or less than half full of beer.
The top of the barrel can be removed, and they can see inside, but they can’t tell if the barrel is more than half full or less than half full.
No measuring tools may be used. How can the brewery workers find out a rough answer to their question?
There are two possible solutions to this.
Hints for lateral thinking puzzles (with answers)
Hint for puzzle #1
As we said, there is nothing wrong with either the building or the elevator. There is, however, some feature of the man that causes him to take the stairs from the seventh floor.
Hint for puzzle #2
The answer has something to do with the process of acquiring the different wages and how you enter them in the calculator. There are two possible lateral thinking solutions.
Hint for puzzle #3
You will need to do something to the cork other than taking it out.
Hint for puzzle #4
Pay careful attention to the wording in the last set of conditions: “Noah is significantly smaller than Milo. Milo is significantly bigger (and older).”
Hint for puzzle #5
There is more than one way of dividing something. The barrel is currently divided horizontally by the liquid. What are some other options?
Answers for lateral thinking puzzles
Answer for puzzle #1
The man is very short and therefore unable to reach the buttons above the seventh floor. This presumes a button layout in descending order.
Answer for puzzle #2
First solution: The first individual enters a fake wage into the calculator. They remember the fake amount so that it can be subtracted later.
The next person enters their real hourly wage and adds it to the fake one. The next individuals continue in this way, each adding their real hourly wage and hitting equal. Thus no one person can see anything but the total.
The tenth individual hands the calculator back to the first, who subtracts the fake amount and adds their real salary, then divides the total by ten to get the average.
Second solution: This solution involves keeping a finger or blocking up the display in some way and proceeding with the standard calculation.
Although this is not as elegant as the solution above, it still meets all conditions.
Answer for puzzle #3
Pushing the cork into the bottle will dislodge it and allow you to shake out the coin.
Answer for puzzle #4
The older brother is taller than the younger brother. Taller people have longer arms.
If Milo stood on Noah’s shoulder – Milo being shorter and shorter people having shorter arms – Milo would not be able to reach the key.
Answer for puzzle #5
First solution: Tip the barrel to measure the liquid diagonally. Tip the barrel until the beer is level to the lowest part of the top, just before the beer would spill over.
This reveals whether the barrel is less than half full. In this case, you can see part of the bottom of the barrel. If the barrel is more than half full, you will not see part of the bottom of the barrel.
Second solution: A second solution is to turn the barrel over so it is lying horizontally. Then tip it up again. Removing the lit should reveal a watermark.
If the mark is beyond the centre of the cover, the barrel is more than half full. If it does not come up to the centre of the lid, then it is less than half full.
Conclusion
If you didn’t get any of the answers to these questions, don’t worry. Thinking laterally takes some practice, and applying it to every situation can be challenging for anyone.
For any of the questions you got wrong, it would benefit you to think about the answers and how you might have used the information offered in the questions differently to arrive at that conclusion.
References
https://www.thoughtco.com/lateral-thinking-1856882
http://www.puzzlesandriddles.com
https://parade.com/1288259/marynliles/lateral-thinking-puzzles
