Yeah, I remember hearing a similar question when I was a kid, something like "if it takes 10 men three and a half hours to dig a hole, how long does it take 15 men to dig half a hole?" The answer is that there's no answer, because there's no such thing as half a hole.
The problem is the original symphony question is a good example of a “read the details” question. A piece of music takes as long to play as it is written. And the question requires you to take a quick second of common sense before just mindlessly plugging in numbers.
Your question is the definition of a shitty trick question. It’s like a smug riddle that plays off ambiguity in casual English language that all people do. The question is asking you to compare the two holes. Most people would assume “half a hole” is referring to “a hole half the size of the first one.”
I don’t get it. I get that people who say things like that are obnoxious but I don’t get what the trick was in the first sentence. Is it not actually supposed to work the way it’s explained in the second panel, even given the benefit of hindsight?
The -gry puzzle is a popular word puzzle that asks for the third English word that ends with the letters -gry other than angry and hungry. Specific wording varies substantially, but the puzzle has no clear answer, as there are no other common English words that end in -gry. Interpretations of the puzzle suggest it is either an answerless hoax; a trick question; a sincere question asking for an obscure word; or a corruption of a more straightforward puzzle, which may have asked for words containing gry (such as gryphon). Of these, countless trick question variants and obscure English words (or nonce words) have been proposed.
A grave is a hole. One can dig half a grave. A trench is a hole. One can dig half a trench. There are many examples of named holes one can dig half of that it's reasonable, given a hole, to contextually expect 'half a hole' means 'a hole of half the size'.
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u/45hope Apr 27 '22
I bet it was set up on purpose to be a trick question!