A Memorial brainteaser
by Miki SaxonGood grief, it’s the day before the Memorial Day weekend and the year’s almost half over. What happened? Seems like yesterday it was just getting started!
Oh well, the Friday before a holiday is time for some fun. Here’s a little quiz that a friend sent, something to give your brain some exercise. Nothing riding on the answers—except a beer if you’re silly enough to bet!
Note: There are no trick questions.
- Name the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.
- What famous North American landmark is constantly moving backward?
- Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables?
- What fruit has its seeds on the outside?
- In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy, with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn’t been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle?
- Only three words in Standard English begin with the letters “dw” and they are all common words. Name two of them.
- There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar. Can you name at least half of them?
- Name the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form except fresh.
- Name 6 or more things that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter “S.”
Answers Monday.
Have a safe and happy holiday!
May 25th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
1. Boxing
2. Niagara Falls
3. That’s not true — there are lots of perennial vegetables: asparagus, rhubarb, radicchio, Jerusalem artichokes, chives, sweet potatoes, water chestnuts, et al. See this list of perennial foods.
4. Strawberries
5. They stick the bottle on the tips of the branches and grow the fruit inside them.
6. dwarf, dwell, dwindle (and of course “dweeb” and the less common “dwine” — more bad trivia :-) )
7. That’s too easy on a computer – you can see most of them on the keyboard! I suppose some people don’t know the names of them, but OK… period, comma, colon, semi-colon, question mark, exclamation mark, parenthese, apostrophe, quotation mark, just to name a few.
8. The standard answer is lettuce — again, more bad trivia. The Chinese and Thai have a dish of fermented lettuce that you can buy canned — kind of like kimchi.
9. Shoes, socks, sandals, stockings, sneakers, slippers, skates, stilts
May 28th, 2007 at 9:27 am
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