Analytical Interview Questions

This puzzle was apparently written by Einstein in the last century. He said that 98% of the people in the world cannot solve the quiz. See if you can...

Facts:

1: There are 5 houses in 5 different colors 2: In each house lives a person with a different nationality. 3: These 5 owners drink a certain beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar and keep a certain pet. 4: No owner has the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same drink.

Hints:

1: The British lives in a red house.
2: The Swede keeps dogs as pets
3: The Dane drinks tea
4: The green house is on the left of the white house (it also means they are next door to each other)
5: The green house owner drinks coffee
6: The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds
7: The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
8: The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk
9: The Norwegian lives in the first house
10: The man who smokes Blend lives next to the one who keeps cats
11: The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill
12: The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer
13: The German smokes Prince
14: The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
15: The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water.

The question is: who keeps the fish?



Solution

The fish is in the fourth house. Its green, the owner drinks coffee, smokes prince and he's German!

For those who want to know the approach for solving such problems:

First figure out is the order of the houses. We can use the following facts:

• The green house is on the left of the white house

• Blue is the second house.

• The center house is important because we know anything about it



So the possibilities could be:

____, Blue, ____, Green, White or ____, Blue, Green, White,____

There are 2 blanks and two colors. Red can't be the first house because the owner of the first house should be from Norway , and the owner of the red house is British.

That leaves us with:

1) Yellow, Blue, ____, Green, White – OR- 2) Yellow, Blue, Green, White, ____

The blank spot is the red house.

The 2nd option can't be true, as we have clues that the center house owner drinks milk, but the green house owner drinks coffee.

So we get the order as: Yellow, Blue, Red, Green, and White. Then it is only the matter of reading the clues to figure out the answer.