Puzzles for Kids and Adults
Each of the words at the bottom can either go before or after a word on the blank to create ten common two-word phrases. Some words have more than one possible placement, but there is only one arrangement which uses all ten words.
The phrases are:
WORLD PEACE / PEACE TREATY
AIR STRIKE / STRIKE OUT
TAP WATER / WATER WHEEL
EMPTY NEST/ NEST EGG
ROCKING HORSE / HORSE RACE
Reading the first letters of each answer, going down the columns, gives WATER TOWER, which is the answer.
To solve this rebus, it is simply necessary to add and subtract the given words and letters, with spaces representing the word breaks.
W + HAT = WHAT
C + LAPIS (From Minecraft) – CLAP = IS
FIRE + WEST – EWE (A female sheep) = FIRST
F + SINGER – S = FINGER
JON (Arbuckle, from Garfield)-J = ON
AT – T = A
H + AND = HAND
This gives the clue phrase What is first finger on a hand?, which is of course the THUMB.
Each image is the logo of a company or product, whose name can be placed into the blanks alongside it. Going down each column, reading only the boxed letters, gives the final answer, DISTANCE LEARNING.
The third logo on the left, ZEARN, may not be as well known as the others, but it is familiar to the kids who have been learning from home these past few months. Originally, the entire puzzle was going to be logos related to distance learning, but those quickly became far too obscure. Zearn and Chrome are the only two which remain from that original puzzle concept.
This puzzle is a meta-puzzle, so it uses the answers from the previous seven puzzles, FROZEN YOGURT, MUSIC BOX, CRYPTOLOGY, DRIVE FAST, MERIDA, HOME PLATE, and DINNER TABLE. In this case, they nicely fit into the blanks in the order the puzzles were released.
Once this is done, all we have to do is read the letters from the boxes and add spaces to get the answer YOU SOLVED A META, which is certainly true.
Congratulations to everybody who solved this meta or any of the puzzles from the past two months. I hope you join in the next puzzle set, which started last week and runs through the end of the year.
This is a standard “Find the Difference” puzzle. If we highlight the lines which appear in each picture that are missing from the other, we find the answer, DINNER TABLE.
Each line of letters unscrambles to a single word, as follows:
SOUNDS
LIKE
A
DISH
FROM
YOUR
HOUSE
BUT
IT
IS
REALLY
FOURTH
BASE
Reading the words in order gives the clue phrase SOUNDS LIKE A DISH FROM YOUR HOUSE, BUT IT IS REALLY FOURTH BASE. There are extra anagrams for a few of the words, but they do not work in the phrase. In baseball, the fourth base is HOME PLATE, which could also refer to a dish (plate) from your house (home).
Each of the lines describes a character from a different Disney (or Disney/Pixar) movie or series. In order, they are:
Simba (Lion King)
Honey Lemon (Big Hero 6)
Olaf (Frozen)
Tiana (The Princess and the Frog)
Felix (Wreck-It Ralph)
Oliver (Oliver & Company)
Russell (Up)
Happy (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)
Edna Mode (The Incredibles)
Rapunzel (Tangled)
Owl (Winnie the Pooh)
Wendy (Peter Pan)
Nick (Zootopia)
Hercules (Hercules)
Ariel (The Little Mermaid)
Nemo (Finding Nemo)
Dumbo (Dumbo)
Reading down the first letter of these answers, we find the clue phrase SHOT FOR HER OWN HAND, a reference to one final Disney character, Princess MERIDA, from the movie Brave.
This puzzle is just a sudoku using letters instead of the numbers 1-9. Once the grid is filled in correctly, the letters in the top row spell out the answer, DRIVE FAST.
This puzzle uses one of the simplest substitution ciphers. Each number represents the number in that position in the alphabet. It is fairly easy to create your own “cheat sheet” by writing out the alphabet and the numbers 1-26 next to each other, as shown:
Using this decryption tool, we find that each row spells out a number, namely:
Three
Eighteen
Twenty-five
Sixteen
Twenty
Fifteen
Twelve
Fifteen
Seven
Twenty-five
Writing each of these as numbers and repeating the process, we can see that that 3-18-25-16-20-15-12-15-7-25 decrypts to CRYPTOLOGY, a very appropriate answer for this puzzle.
The pictures of instruments can be identified as a BASS DRUM, COWBELL, GUITAR, KAZOO, SAXOPHONE, TAMBOURINE, TROMBONE, and TUBA. The pictures were given in alphabetical order to make it slightly easier to identify missing instruments.
Each of these instrument names contains a different number of letters (with the exception of bass drum, which has the same number of letters as trombone, but does include a space). This allows the names to be put in the grid in exactly one way.
Reading down the only complete column, we see the answer, MUSIC BOX.