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Courtesy from : http://www.kith.org/logos/things/sitpuz/answers.txt

1) A man lives on the twelfth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator -- or if it was raining that day -- he goes back to his floor directly. However, if there is nobody else in the elevator and it hasn't rained, he goes to the tenth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to his room.

The man is a midget. He can't reach the upper elevator buttons, but he can ask people to push them for him. He can also push them with his umbrella.

2) A man sitting on a park bench reads a newspaper article headlined "Death at Sea" and knows a murder has been committed.

  The man is a travel agent. He had sold someone two tickets for an ocean voyage, one round-trip and one one-way. The last name of the man who bought the tickets is the same as the last name of the woman who "fell" overboard and drowned on the same voyage, which is the subject of the article he's reading.

3) Two men enter a bar. They both order identical drinks. One lives; the other dies. 

  The drinks contain poisoned ice cubes; one man drinks slowly, giving them time to melt, while the other drinks quickly and thus doesn't get much of the poison. The fact that they drink at different speeds could be added to the statement.

4) A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, "Thank you," and walks out.

  The man has hiccups; the bartender scares them away by pulling a gun.

5) An avid birdwatcher sees an unexpected bird. Soon he's dead.

He is a passenger in an airplane and sees the bird get sucked into an engine at 20,000 feet.

6) He was killed by breakfast in a snowy mountain.

A man is camping in the mountains. He makes breakfast, then puts pepper on his food (eggs, perhaps). The pepper makes him sneeze loudly, which starts an avalanche, which kills him.

7) There are a carrot, a pile of pebbles, and a pipe lying together in the middle of a field. 

They're the remains of a melted snowman.

8) A man is found shot to death in the front seat of his car; a gun lies out of his reach in the back seat. All the windows are closed and the doors are locked; there are no bullet holes anywhere in the car.

The car is a convertible; the top was down. (Or the sunroof, or something else that's neither window nor door.) The murderer shot him and then dropped the gun into the back seat of the car.

9) A man in uniform stands on the beach of a tropical island. He takes out a cigarette, lights it, and begins smoking. He takes out a letter and begins reading it. The cigarette burns down between his fingers, but he doesn't throw it away. He cries.

He is a guard/attendant in a leper colony. The letter (to him) tells him that he has contracted the disease. The key is the cigarette burning down between his fingers -- leprosy is fairly unique in killing off sensory nerves without destroying motor ability.

10) A woman is heating her coffee in a small microwave oven. She puts it in for exactly two minutes. She then opens the door, closes it, then heats her coffee for two more seconds.

She opens the door and sees that the handle of her cup is facing the back of the microwave. She then sets the oven for two more seconds so that the turntable will turn 180 degrees so that she can reach the cup-handle, to avoid burning her hand.

11) A man is lying, dead, face down in the desert wearing a backpack. He's got a ring in his hand. No footprint seen in the desert

He jumped out of an airplane, but his parachute failed to open. The ring came off of the ripcord

12) A man finishes getting dressed, lies down and dies.

There is a poisonous spider in the toe of his shoe. The last things he puts on are his shoes. He gets bitten, feels ill, lies down on his bed, and then dies of the poison.

13) Every day a man drinks his breakfast and drinks his lunch. When his boss finds out, he is immediately fired. The man moves to another job and begins doing the same thing; this time, when his boss finds out, the boss jokingly tells him that he'll be fired if he stops.

  The man is drinking diet shakes for his breakfast and lunch in order to lose weight. Unfortunately, his first job is at a weight-loss clinic, so he is fired for patronizing the competition. His second job is at a health-food store, and his boss wants him to lose weight so he looks "healthier."

14) A man gets onto an elevator. When the elevator stops, he knows his wife is dead.

He's leaving a hospital after visiting his wife, who's on heavy life-support. When the power goes out, he knows she can't live without the life-support systems

15) A man lies dead next to a feather.

The man was a sword swallower in a carnival side-show. While he was practicing, someone tickled his throat with the feather, causing him to gag.

16) Four people are on a grass-covered island. A fire burns from one end of the island to the other, but no one gets severely burnt.

The fire is slow moving and the four are able to "back burn" by starting a new fire on the other side of them. When an area is burnt off, they can safely stand on the burnt patch, as it now contains no fuel for the grass fire. This is an actual technique used in Australian bushfires

17) A dying man gives another man a gift, and then the dying man dies. Shortly after that the second man dies.

The second man had shot the first man. Before he dies, the first man gives the second man a grenade pin, which he's of course just pulled from a grenade. The first man dies, then the grenade explodes and the second man dies .

18) The king dies and two men both claim to be his long-lost son. One of the king's advisors proposes a test to determine the identity of the true heir. One claimant agrees to the test; the other refuses. The one who agreed is sent packing; the one who refused is identified as the rightful heir.

  The proposed test was a blood test. Knowing that blood typing isn't very accurate, the impostor felt it was worth trying to get away with it. But the true heir was a hemophiliac and couldn't give blood for the test.

19) A man kills his wife, then goes inside his house and kills himself.

It's the man's fiftieth birthday, and in celebration of this he plans to kill his wife, then take the money he's embezzled and move on to a new life in another state. His wife takes him out to dinner; afterward, on their front step, he kills her. He opens the door, dragging her body in with him, and all the lights suddenly turn on and a group of his friends shout "Surprise!" He kills himself.

20) A U.S. Navy sailor on the deck of a cruiser noticed an explosive mine in the water directly in the path of the ship. With no time to communicate the situation to the captain of the ship, the sailor saved the lives of the crew and the ship.

The sailor grabbed the fire hose from the deck and used the force of the water from the hose to push the mine away from the hull of the ship. The water pressure doesn't explode the mine; WWII-style mines contain magnetic sensors which make them explode on contact with a ship's hull.

21) A couple rents a motel room. In the middle of the night, as the husband goes outside to get something from his car, he forgets which room he was in. He can't call his wife as she is deaf. What should he do?

So he honks the car horn loudly, waking up everyone else in the motel. The other residents all get up and turn on their room lights; the man then returns to the one dark room.

22) As I drive to work on my motorcycle, there is one corner which I go around at a certain speed whether it's rainy or sunny. If it's cloudy but not raining, however, I usually go faster.

There's a car wash on that corner. On rainy days, the rain reduces traction. On sunny days, water from the car wash has the same effect. If rain is threatening, though, the car wash gets little business and thus doesn't make the road wet, so I can take the corner faster.

23) A married couple goes to a movie. During the movie the husband strangles the wife. He is able to get her body home without attracting attention.

The movie is at a drive-in theatre

24) Music stops and a woman dies.

The "woman" is the dancing figure atop a music box, who "dies" when the box runs down.

25) An ordinary American citizen, with no passport, visits over thirty foreign countries in one day. He is welcomed in each country, and leaves each one of his own accord.

He is a mail courier who delivers packages to the different foreign embassies in the United States. The land of an embassy belongs to the country of the embassy, not to the United States.

26) A man is found hanging in a locked room with a puddle of water under his feet. There's no furniture in the room.

  He stood on a block of ice (or a mound of snow) to hang himself.

27) A woman buys a new pair of shoes, goes to work, and dies.

The woman is the assistant to a (circus or sideshow) knife-thrower. The new shoes have higher heels than she normally wears, so that the thrower misjudges his aim and one of his knives kills her during the show.

28) A woman has incontrovertible proof in court that her husband was murdered by her sister. The judge declares, "This is the strangest case I've ever seen. Though it's a cut-and-dried case, this woman cannot be punished." 

The sisters are Siamese twins.

29) A man is found dead on a path 200 feet from a gate. Other than his clothes, all he had with him was a stick.

The gate is the starting gate of a horse race. The man is a jockey who fell off his horse shortly after it left the gate and got run over by the rest of the horses. The stick is his riding crop.

30) A married couple was speeding into town when their sedan ran out of gas. The man went for help after making sure his wife closed the windows and locked the doors of the car. Upon his return, he found his wife dead and a stranger in the car. The windows were still closed, the doors were still locked, and no damage was done to the car.

The woman gave birth, and bled to death. Since the father has never seen the baby before, the kid can technically be called a stranger.

31) A woman throws something out a window and dies.

The object she throws is a boomerang. It flies out, loops around, and comes back and hits her in the head, killing her. Boomerangs do not often return so close to the point from which they were thrown, but I believe it's possible for this to happen.

32) Two men are kidnapped and are placed in the trunk of a car. The next morning, when the trunk is opened, one man is alive and the other is dead.

  One of them suffocated; the other lived by breathing the air from the spare tire in the trunk.

33) A man wakes up one night to get some water. He turns off the light and goes back to bed. The next morning he looks out the window, screams, and feels guilty

  The man is a lighthouse keeper. He turns off the light in the lighthouse and during the night a ship crashes on the rocks. Seeing this the next morning, the man realizes what he's done

34) A man is born in 1972 and dies in 1952 at the age of 25.

He's born in room number 1972 of a hospital and dies in room number 1952. The numbers can of course vary; it was originally set up with those numbers reversed (born in 1952, died in 1972).

35) A man pushes a car up to a hotel and tells the owner he's bankrupt.

 It's a game of Monopoly.

36) A black man dressed all in black, wearing a black mask, stands at a crossroads in a totally black-painted town. All of the streetlights in town are broken. There is no moon. A black-painted car without headlights drives straight toward him, but turns in time and doesn't hit him.

  It's daytime; the sun is out.

37) Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice all live in the same house. Bob and Carol go out to a movie, and when they return, Alice is lying dead on the floor in a puddle of water and glass. It is obvious that Ted killed her but Ted is not prosecuted or severely punished.

Alice is a goldfish; Ted is a cat.

38) A very rich man hires a poor man to clean one wing of his extravagant domicile. The poor man, wanting to impress his new boss, cleans the entire house. Soon after, the man quits his job. (

  The poor man is hired by Aladdin to clean his palace. Aladdin only wants the man to clean part of the palace because he does not wish anyone to enter his bedroom, where he keeps the magic lamp. The poor man meticulously scrubs the palace from head to toe, and rubs the magic lamp in the process. The jinn appears; the poor man wishes for riches, and no longer needs the job.

39) A joker throws a stone towards a boy but it missed him. However, the boy still die because of it. (even the color bar below is a hint too)

  The dead boy is Superboy; the rock is Green Kryptonite. The joker is Batman 'best' friend.

40) It's the year 860 A.D., at Camelot. Two priests are sitting in the castle's chapel. The queen attacks the king. The two priests rise, shake hands, and leave the room.

  The two priests are playing chess; one of them just mated by moving his queen.

41) Two men are found dead outside of an igloo.

  The men have gone spelunking and have taken an Igloo brand cooler with them so they can have a picnic down in the caves. They cleverly used dry ice to keep their beer cold, not realizing that as the dry ice sublimed (went from solid state to vapor state) it would push the lighter oxygen out of the cave and they would suffocate.

42) Bruce wins the race, but he gets no trophy.

  Bruce is a horse.

43) As a man jumps out of a window, he hears the telephone ring and regrets having jumped.

This is a post-holocaust scenario of some kind; for whatever reason, the man believes himself to be the last human on earth. He doesn't want to live by himself, so he jumps, just before the telephone rings... (of course, it could be a computer calling, but he has no way of knowing).

44) Adults are holding children, waiting their turn. The children are handed (one at a time, usually) to a man, who holds them while a woman shoots them. If the child is crying, the man tries to stop the crying before the child is shot.

  Kids getting their pictures taken with Santa.

45) A man is doing his job when his suit tears. Fifteen minutes later, he's dead.

The man is an astronaut out on a space walk

46) A train pulls into a station, but none of the waiting passengers move.

It's a model train set.

47) A professional killer had shot his face-to-face victim by using a single bullet while. Forensic specialist revealed that there were entry and exit wound behind the victim's back. How was that happened? 

Victim was hunchback

 

   if you have any interesting LATERAL puzzle

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