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

toilet paper

Things get smaller or older the more you use them, right? But when you think about something that gets thinner... it might be hard to come up with an answer. Try expanding your ideas: places you often go, things you use there, and so on! Once you figure it out, this is a riddle that will leave you with a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Because I exchanged money.

With ordinary paper, you can’t split it into ten pieces without cutting it with scissors. But if that paper were a 10,000-yen bill, you could exchange it and split it into ten 1,000-yen bills! By using your imagination about what kind of “paper” is being divided into ten, you can find the answer.

six animals

In this quiz, the key is how the word is read. When you hear kuwaete itta, you might imagine someone holding something in their mouth and carrying it away. However, instead of “to hold in the mouth” (kuchi ni kuwaeru), if you interpret it as “to add” (kuwaeru), you arrive at the answer: six animals.

human being

The wording “living creature” in the problem statement is awfully tricky, isn’t it? When we hear “living creature,” we tend to focus on animals, but humans are living creatures too. If you think about it that way, you meet the old man and the old woman before the dog or the monkey, don’t you?

hand

If you interpret 「何で」 as nande or doushite (why), you might never find an answer. But if you read 「何で」 as nani de (with what), you can arrive at the answer: the “hand” (te)! Pay attention to how the kanji is read.

dog

In English, a dog is “dog,” pronounced “doggu” in Japanese. If you read that backwards, it becomes “good,” which in English is spelled “good” and means “nice” or “good.” The key is to think of animals as words, not to actually have the animals do handstands.

crack

When a crack forms in a bottle, we say it’s “cracked,” right? The answer to this quiz uses that expression. Instead of focusing on what’s inside the bottle, the key to finding the answer is to look more broadly at the bottle’s condition.