Brain Teasers

This month we have yet another great Martin Gardner puzzle. Full disclosure, doing this one made me a little dizzy! But if you do it in a “systematic” way, it’s possible to do it without getting nauseous! One of these spirals is formed with a single piece of...

This month’s “brain teaser” is actually a Data Sufficiency question, which is a question type that appears on the Data Insights section of the GMAT. These questions tend to be tricky and reward reasoning more than pure math ability! The answer choices are...

You are in a storage room with 3 wooden crates. One is labeled APPLES, one is labeled ORANGES, and one is labeled APPLES & ORANGES. You are told that every single label is wrong. Inside each crate is either only apples, only oranges, or a mix of apples...

This month we have a great “spatial reasoning” puzzle from the prodigious writer of brain teasers, Martin Gardner. This one is an absolute gem! Enjoy! The below image depicts a large capital letter that has been cut from a piece of paper and given a single...

This month we have more of a question than a brain teaser. But, it definitely has a brain teaser-ish feel to it! Enjoy! Suppose you are on a boat in the middle of a lake. There is an extremely heavy lead anchor in the boat. If you were to throw the anchor...

Once again we dip into official test questions for our monthly brain teaser! This one is an actual ACT question. If you struggle with it, take comfort in knowing that this one took me longer than I’d like to admit (I saw this question on an actual ACT that I...

In this month’s “brain teaser,” we present an official GMAT question. While thinking about this question, it’s critical to remember/understand that the GMAT does not allow a calculator on the Quantitative Section, so this question must be able to be solved...

This month’s brain teaser comes from one of our students! It's a question that one of her colleagues asks people in job interviews. So, lest you think that pondering brain teasers (especially confusingly worded and seemingly inane ones like the below) are a...

Below we once again share an official GMAT question as our monthly brain teaser. Like many difficult GMAT and GRE questions, and even like many of the most difficult SAT/ACT questions, this one shares a lot in common with brain teasers. The question looks...

A traveller arrives in a small town and decides to get a haircut. There are only two barbershops in town: one on East Street and one on West Street. The East Street barbershop is a mess, and the barber has the worst haircut the traveller has ever seen. The...

Below is a classic brain teaser that plays some of the same tricks that one sees on standardized tests, especially the GMAT and GRE. A boy is walking down the road with a doctor. While the boy is the doctor's son, the doctor isn't the boy's father. Then who...

In each of the sentences below, the name of an animal is concealed. The first sentence is marked so that you can see how the word “dog” is hidden. See if you can find the animal hidden in each of the other sentences! What shall I do, Gertrude? Asking nutty...

We love helping people think critically and solve problems—skills that are key to test success and beyond! This month’s brain teaser is a classic. Enjoy! If a car drives the 60 miles from San Jose to San Francisco at an average speed of 30mph, at what...

We recently highlighted the legendary Martin Gardner, a well-known author of riddles and puzzles. Below we share two of his brain teasers. Below, we’re excited to share two of his classic brain teasers. Dive in and enjoy the fun! THE MISPELLED WORD Somewhere...

Ben has 30 pencils in a box. Each of the pencils is one of 5 different colors, and there are 6 pencils of each color. If Ben selects pencils one at a time from the box without being able to see the pencils, what is the minimum number of pencils that he must...

When an old tree was felled, a very thin ring was detected among the oldest rings in the stump. When the width of rings, each corresponding to one year`s growth, was correlated with local rainfall records, it was found, as expected, that thicker rings had...

Once again we’re trying to illustrate the brain-teaser-esque nature of GMAT, GRE, SAT, and ACT questions. It tends to be easier to do that with Quantitative questions, but we wanted to illustrate the level of reasoning and critical thinking ability needed...

­Select for a and for b values such that the equation x/a=x-b has more than one solution for x. Make only two selections, one in each column. Answer:A=1 and B=0. This is a GMAT question from the Data Insights section and is technically not a brain teaser,...

This month we have another classic-style brain teaser. This one requires some creative problem solving. The answer is a surprisingly small number, so give yourself a chance to work it out and don’t jump right to the answer! You have 9 marbles. 8 have the...

Ashley and Cassandra drove their cars along the same route for 400 miles and then stopped at a gasoline station, where each purchased exactly the amount of gasoline needed to fill her car's gasoline tank to capacity. If both cars began with full gasoline...