Brain Teasers
Dead Elevator
Situation
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.Situation
A man gets onto an elevator. When the elevator stops, he knows his wife is dead. How?
Answer
He's leaving a hospital after visiting his wife, who's on a life support system. The power goes out, stopping the elevator and, he guesses, the life support system, too. (He assumes if the emergency backup generator were working, the elevator wouldn't lose power either.)Hide Answer Show Answer
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Comments
Again, when it comes together, it makes sense, but there is NO WAY you could possibly come to that conclusion bsaed solely on the information provided.
Number 1, he wouldn't expect the worse. It would be way better if she was being electrocuted in Texas and the power shorts out a bit when they fry her. Or maybe she's already dead....
dont the nursing staff at that hospital know how to keep people alive..surely with CPR they can keep this woman alive indefinately... she is stable apart from needing life support which can be given by the staff...... i thought she could have been tied to the bottom of the elevator and when it stopped at the ground floor he knew she would have been crushed to death
ok, captbob, it's a situation puzzle. Do you know what that is? it means that you ask questions about the puzzle and someone who already knows the answer to the puzzle responds with yes or no. This is not a one-person teaser. it's a team teaser. read the little note at the top of the teaser.
Not all hospital elevators are connected to the emergency or backup power system.
If you go by the description at the top literally, all situation puzzles could be covered by one generic teaser; namely "Something happens, why?" There must be some element of a clue given in the puzzle and preferably it should lead to a surprising but obvious with hindsight answer.
i wouldn't have thought that any hospital would waste emergency generator power on an elevator
That's sad
Also, most, if not all life support systems have battery backup which kicks in when the powers goes out and allows several hours of continued operation for the power to be restored or more batteries to be obtained. Or like recently in the US hurricane issue, they are kept alive with hand bellows for breathing and such.
how do we even know the power went out? maybe the elevator was just jammed or something
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