Lateral Thinking Questions

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ANSWER: L.T.Q. #66  !
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Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 21:12:51 -0500 (EST)

Here is this week's question:

Wrongway Blacktopp, the famous African explorer, claims that when he is in the far north, he can point his car north on an ordinary road very much like Route 66, drive it for one kilometre, and without turning around, end up one kilometre south of where he started. How does he do it?

ANSWER:

Wrongway Blacktopp drives his car in reverse.

Obscurity rules supreme in the world of oddlystrange, who aside from the correct answer, had this to say: "Well, of course this is in metrics... you see metrics just, well, they're metrics... they're like, intelligent. Whereas American measurement was made by kings to be as retarded as possible so that the peasants wouldn't really realize that they were being scammed out of money by the king's version of the IRS because trying to make sense out of inches and acres was so damn hard to remember that they just paid to shut the taxman up. But of course this has little to do with this week's question."

Among her many other questions, Narelle asked "does the road curve around? He wouldn't really be turning around then. Oh but he wouldn't be quite a kilometre south of where he started would he. But if he drove backwards he wouldn't have to be in the far north would he or was that just put there as a trick?"

Yes, the reference to the far north was a red herring, and it left a lot of you in the cold.

Andrew found the correct answer without realizing it. Wrongway "is starting from the North Pole. But, I am wondering, is that north magnetic or north geographic? Or is he actually at the South Pole and driving backwards?"

And nobody wondered how the kilometre was measured. If the roads were icy enough, he could have spun his wheels, measured the distance on the odometer, and wound up in the same place he started from.

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