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Constitution
Answers
Kickself
WHICH FIRST? The match.
MULTINATIONAL: We don't bury survivors.
DUCK: An egg.
RICE: Because there are more of them.
FINGERS: "Normal". You should have half your fingers on each hand.
Fairly Easy
CRITTERS: B is the odd one out. The others are made from the two halves of the club, spade, heart and diamond shapes.
RED AND BLACK: 4/9. After the first card, four of the remaining nine will match it, five of them won't.
RELATIVE SQUARES: 104 (born 1892, was 44 in 1936) and 16 (born 1980, 45 in 2025).
MESHING AROUND: 73 times. Because 73 is prime, the smaller wheel will rotate 73 times and the larger wheel n times, where n is the number of teeth on the smaller wheel.
Harder
REGULAR EVENT: The hour hand and minute hand of a clock exactly coincide.
SHEAR MAGIC:
ESCALATOR: 18 seconds.
CATERPILLAR AND LIZARD: The lizard is sane, the caterpillar mad.
LIARS: Two liars - Xerxes and Zach.
EVERY WHICH WAY: The centre arrow should point UP. (The sequence goes down, left, left, right, up, in a clockwise spiral from top left.)
SINGULAR GOAT: A single goat could graze indefinitely. If g is the amount of grass a goat eats per day, then 9g was available over 3 days or 12g over 6 days. The difference, 3g, represents the growth in the extra 3 days. So the rate of growth is g per day and the initial reserve 6g. The single goat consumes g per day, so will never exhaust the supply.
Baffling
CAKE WHOLES: Winston ate 5 scones. The only way the figures can fit with the other facts given is if "Winston's sister-in-law and daughter-in-law" is one person, not two. This is possible if his wife's sister is married to his son.
HARDWARE: A house number - eighty cents a digit.
EXCESS WORD: The excess word was IN. The competition was to write a movie advertising line in which the initial letters of the words spelt the names of famous movies backwards. Thus JAWS, MASH, THE S(I)TING.
BIRTHDAY WEATHER: Lucy will be 100 in 1996. Anniversaries seven years apart can only fall on the same day of the week if no leap-day (February 29) occurs in the seven-year span. 1900 was not a leap-year because it is not divisible by 400. Lucy must have been born in 1896, after which the next leap-year was 1904. The weather details are irrelevant!
ODD WORDS: Nincompoop. Each word starts with the letter whose alphabetical position corresponds to the number of letters in the previous word. Thus "Competence" has ten letters and is followed by "Just", which begins with the tenth letter of the alphabet.