Army Helmets
Situation puzzles (sometimes called lateral thinking puzzles) are ones where you need to ask lots of yes or no questions to figure out what happened in the situation. These are good puzzles for groups where one person knows the puzzle and answers the questions.
A fairly poor country was in the middle of a war. Being on the lower-end of the economic scale, they didn't have enough money for fancy armor or weapons. They typically went into battle armed with nothing more than regular clothes, cloth helmets, and an assortment of older-model firearms.
A few months into the war, the ruler of the country decided that an investment in new Army helmets would probably be a wise choice (considering the large number of head injuries caused by the thin cloth ones). After spending nearly all the money the country could scrape together on new steel helmets, they were shocked to see the number of head injuries go up.
How could it be possible that steel helmets, assuming the helmets fit perfectly, caused more injuries than cloth?
Answer
When people in the Army would be shot in the head (with a cloth helmet) they wouldn't get head injuries, they would die. Cloth may protect somewhat, but not enough to stop most bullets. Death isn't considered a head injury. However, with steel helmets, the bullet could be slowed down enough to not kill, but just injure. If a hit in the head wasn't fatal, it would be considered a head injury. So, instead of most shots to the head being fatal, they became head injuries.
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Comments
kman613  
Dec 01, 2006
| I like this one, but perhaps would have changed the info in the story to "considering the amount of death by head wounds". This would still hide the fact that in one case it was death, and afterwards only injury, but still make it somewhat difficult to reason out. |
scallio 
Dec 01, 2006
| Great teaser!
 |
blondebookworm
Dec 01, 2006
| It's a really cool idea, but it might have been a little bit easier if there had been a time period. Since they had cloth helmets, I was assuming they were living long before guns were around. Fun teaser though.  |
GebbieRose
Dec 01, 2006
| Very interesting & different. You got me! |
Punk_Rocker
Dec 04, 2006
| Ah, I'd heard this somewhere before...But I can't think of where! I love it though. =] |
senther7 
Dec 05, 2006
| Nice one got it right on the first try-OMG  |
bluefever101
Jan 14, 2007
| hahaha... good one. I like it. good work!  |
cyberstar5150
Feb 09, 2007
| Adding to one of my favs... loved the technicalities |
keke9307
Mar 05, 2007
| Never would have thought of that one. You got me,  GOOD!!  |
Jimbo
Mar 06, 2007
| Yes, this is abit like the road accident staitics on drinking and driving. If you look at a graph of blood alcohol content versus involvement in accidents, at first, the higher teh blood alcohol the more likely you are to be involved in an accident but then it reaches a point where the correlation reverses. The higher the blood alcohol level, the less likely you are to be involved in an accident. It doesn't mean that drivers shoulkd drink more, it means that drinkers are reaching a point where they are incapable of driving...standing...breathing!! |
GABALLA06
Apr 28, 2007
| Awesome teaser. You got me there! |
clarinet1293
May 16, 2007
| This was interesting! Nice teaser! |
amn22492
May 23, 2007
| haha nice one! although i would have invested on artillary... |
mosca
Sep 05, 2007
| Very good teaser! I didn't get it, but the reasoning is great! |
liketeasers
Jul 17, 2008
| well, i thought since they spent all their money on helmets, they didn't have any more money to get new weapons (rifles) so i thought the more injuries were caused by the extremely low amount of weapons. |
beyonce123
Feb 14, 2010
| good but should be under trick |
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