A set of tricky common-sense quizzes that catch you off guard. A collection of trick questions with answers that make you say, “Ah, that makes sense.”

Neither of them is standing.

Both the Great Buddha of Nara and the Great Buddha of Kamakura are seated statues, posed in meditation, so they have never “stood.” It’s a quiz that trips you up if you don’t realize it’s a trick question about posture rather than about when the buildings or statues were completed.

pregnant woman

Humans have only one heart, but a pregnant woman has a baby in her belly. If you combine the baby’s heart with the mother’s own heart, there are two or more hearts inside her body. If she’s pregnant with twins or triplets, then there would be three or more hearts. This wasn’t about special abilities or illnesses—it was a trick question about recognizing the “life in the womb.”

Hard to read.

When someone says “Turn the newspaper upside down,” it’s the kind of trick question that makes you want to answer, “It still reads ‘shinbunshi’ even from the other end.” But turning a newspaper upside down doesn’t change the nature of the paper itself or its contents. It simply flips the orientation of the characters, making it harder for us humans to read—nothing more than a mischievous question.

conductor

Even on a packed train, the people who can always get a seat are the crew involved in operating the train—in other words, the conductors. They’re not riding as passengers; they’re on duty in a dedicated crew compartment, so they can sit in designated seats regardless of how crowded the train is.

vegetables

When someone asks “nansai?” I instinctively think of the age-related “何歳” and start trying to calculate a number, but the correct answer here is “yasai” (vegetables). Chinese cabbage, cabbage, and carrots are all tasty vegetables harvested from the field. It was a fun riddle that uses the sound of words and requires flexible thinking.

The end.

It’s a classic trick question that exploits the human tendency to want to answer with a specific number when asked, “How many pages?” But if you read a picture book all the way to the last page, you’ll often see the words “The End,” and when finishing reading aloud, people often say, “Okay, the end,” and close the book. I bet quite a few people got tripped up by this without realizing it.

Translation

This question isn’t asking for the current time; it’s a classic trick quiz that uses a wordplay. You need to interpret “nanji” in the prompt “Ima, nanji?” not as the time, but as the number of characters. Therefore, the correct answer is two characters. The key is to reinterpret the meaning of the words with flexible thinking instead of judging only by how they sound.