A quiz that seems easy but is actually hard: trick questions that make you think flexibly

donut

There are many different shapes of donuts, but the most common one is the kind with a hole in the middle. That hole in the center is something you absolutely can’t eat—even if you want to—because there’s nothing there. So the answer is a donut with a hole in the middle.

Age

Our age goes up by one every year, but it never goes down and returns us to being a baby, right? Even if we say we want to go back to our younger days, the number that is age doesn’t decrease—that’s the reality. Here’s a little quiz with a bittersweet twist.

one animal

To answer the riddle, you shouldn't look up at the sky to check how many flies are actually flying. The point of this quiz is to focus on the kanji for “sky” (空). If you remove the top radical (the “crown”) from 空, you’re left with shapes that look like the katakana characters ハ (ha) and エ (e). That’s why the answer is that there is only one “fly” (ハエ, hae) in the sky.

peach

In this quiz, you must first change the way you say “mother” from okāsan to mama. Next, change the writing of mama to MAMA. Then, take the phrase “Mama ga egao ni naru” (Mama becomes all smiles) and interpret the “egao” part as “A becomes O.” By changing the As in MAMA to Os, you get MOMO, which means “peach.”

100 animals

There are 200 fish in total. Of those, 99% are guppies, which means there are 198 guppies and 2 non-guppies. If you want to make the guppies 98%, you have to reduce the number of guppies. Since there are 2 non-guppies, if you reduce the guppies from 198 by 100, you’ll have 98 guppies and 2 other fish, making it 98%. Reduce by 100 just to lower it by 1%? It might be surprising, but that’s the interesting part of this problem.

clock

The hands of a clock keep moving every day unless the battery runs out, right? Because they tirelessly keep going day after day, we can tell what time it is. The key to this quiz is to focus on a “thing” rather than a person or an animal!

firefighter

When you hear “bōshi,” you tend to imagine something you wear on your head, but the key to this quiz is not getting stuck on that idea. The word “shōbōshi” (firefighter) contains the word “bōshi” hidden inside it, so “firefighter” is the answer. It also matches because firefighters actually put out fires!