Brain Teaser Riddles for ESL students

Here are some fun brain-teaser riddles. Let us give them a try!

(*Source: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator-english/riddles-for-esl-students/ & picture source from https://englishteaching101.com/funny-brain-teasers-for-kids/ )  

Riddles for Beginners

   

   1.   How many letters are in the alphabet?

   2.   What has a face and two hands but no arms or legs?

   

   3.   There’s a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it?

   

   4.   As I was going to St. Ives,

I met a man with seven wives,

Each wife had seven sacks,

Each sack had seven cats,

Each cat had seven kits:

Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,

How many were there going to St. Ives?





<Answer Keys for Beginner Riddles>

   1.  11  (t-h-e-a-l-p-h-a-b-e-t)

   2.  a clock

   3.  a house

   4.  one

Slightly Hard Riddles

    

   5.   What instrument can you hear but never see?

    6.   What occurs once in a minute, twice in a moment and never in one thousand years?

    7.   Which letter of the alphabet has the most water?

<Answer Keys for Medium level riddles>

    5.  your voice

    6.  the letter  “M”

    7.  C (“sea” )

Difficult Riddles


8. What five-letter word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?



9. What word begins and ends with an E but only has one letter?



10. I am a word. If you pronounce me rightly, it will be wrong. If you pronounce me wrong it is right. What word am I?



<Answer Keys for Difficult Riddles>

    8.  short (Short-er)

    9.  envelope

    10.              wrong

Advanced/ Bookworm levels of Riddles from Literature

11.

“What walks on four feet in the morning,

two in the afternoon,

and three at night?”

– “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles



12.

“This thing all things devours;

Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town,

And beats mountain down.”

– “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien



13.

“Voiceless it cries,

Wingless flutters,

Toothless bites,

Mouthless mutters.”

– “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien



14.

“If you break me, I’ll not stop working.

 If you can touch me, my work is done.

If you lose me, you must find me with a ring soon after. What am I?”

– “Wizard and Glass” by Stephen King



15.

“First think of the person who lives in disguise,

Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies,

Next tell me what’s always the last thing to mend,

The middle of middle and end of the end?

And finally give me the sound often heard,

During the search for a hard-to-find word.

Now string them together, and answer me this,

Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?”

– “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” by J.K. Rowling





<Answer Keys for Advanced Levels of Riddles from Literature>

    11.              man

    12.              time

    13.              wind

    14.              the heart

    15.              spider (spy – d – er)

Dr. J's Diary #38. Cloak of Confidentiality

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or support groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come across were the paths through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own life, being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life….or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.

Episode # 38. Cloak of Confidentiality



I remember and see those two years as the most shameful and bizarre experience in my life as a psychiatrist. Every Wednesday, my afternoon was fully occupied by this meeting with Father Newman at his request. He had been in this small Roman Catholic parish for more than 5 years. Each time we had the afternoon get-together, I was feeling not only close to this honest and down-to-earth Father, but also impressed by his candid criticism about corrupted priests and ministers of some old churches. Father Newman seemed to be the most kind and soft-spoken person in the world who would give his everything to redeem anyone sinned or persecuted in the dark.





It was a cold winter night that I got a call from my friend Will, who worked as a human right activist in an anti-abuse group. He sounded a bit drunk that night but pretty clear with his point to make on the other side of the phone. “Hey, you might think I’m nuts, but…. listen. We need you to help us. More than a hundred and fifty Catholics here in this church should be saved from this evil Father Newman.” Since I knew that Will was not the kind of guy who would cook up a malignant story to slander somebody, I became all ears to his desperate voice. I interrupted him there. “Where are you, Will? Are you at home? You want me to come over to see you now? Well…guess we’d better meet up tomorrow when you are sober.” Will was way too adamant to avoid the serious talk that night.





The church was like a haven in the community where a lot of people in need or in pain from life come to pray any day, any time of a week. As might be expected of any religious group of people, the church was like the last resort for those helpless souls to turn to, and their precious Father Newman was the one and only ‘divine being’ that could jawbone each and every person there into living their lives in God’s providence. No one ever doubted their deep-rooted faith and belief in Father’s Newman numinous presence in their lives. Until my friend Will brought up the issue that night when he called me, never had I questioned Father Newman’s sincerity or integrity as a priest. However, what Will said to me that night had been heavily weighing on my mind for months and months. “It’d be another sin if I kept quiet about this filthy truth. You remember Father Lopez who got excommunicated from this church a year ago? I was devastated to see him being expelled like that just because he disclosed the sordid secret of Father Newman that had been pent-up for a long time here in this church.”





Since Father Lopez had to leave the church as he revealed what happened to more than a dozen people there, those in trouble also started to leave the place one by one over the years. They were the very ones who went to confession about how Father Newman had railroaded them into falling a victim to his own evil course. For years, I had been an important part of their lives to stay sane back to their mental weal. My friend Will was no longer attending the church either. Thanks to his active support, those innocent people victimized by Newman were able to turn their cases and the information about clerical sexual abuse claims over to the lawful authorities. Although it may take some time for this change in clerical policy to be applied retroactively to all other former cases, I felt relieved to hear that Father Newman was defrocked.





I still feel so ashamed of being deceived by Father Newman. It’d still sound so lame and cowardly if I said I was just giving the man the benefit of the doubt, because nobody there at the church raised the issue or spoke up about it.

Expressions

   

   1.   last resort: a final course of action, used only when all else has failed

   2.  to jawbone somebody into doing something: to speak forcefully and persuasively to

   3.  numinous: supernatural/ mysterious/ appealing to the higher emotions or to the aesthetic sense

   4.   to keep quiet about something: refrain from disclosing information about something; keep something secret

   5.  sordid: dirty/ involving ignoble actions and motives; arousing moral distaste and contempt

   6.  pent-up: closely confined or held back

   7.  to go to confession:

   8.  to railroad somebody into doing something:

   9.  weal: (antonym: woe) well-being

   10.              retroactively: with effect from a date in the past

   11.               to defrock…: deprive (someone) of professional status or membership of a prestigious group

(*source of picture: Irish Times)

NPR WORD PUZZLE only with L, T, and vowels

Let’s have fun with last weekend ‘s on-air challenge for the NPR Word Puzzle. Every answer is a word, name, or phrase in which the only consonants are L and T — repeated as often as necessary. All the other letters are vowels. 

(You can listen to this Word Puzzle on https://www.npr.org/2020/05/17/857554125/sunday-puzzle-a-game-of-consonants)


Example: add up --> TOTAL

     1.   Opposite of big

     2.   Coffee made with hot steamed milk

     3.   Name, as of a book or movie

     4.   Dole out

     5.   Sweepstakes game

     6.   "For rent" sign (2 wds.)

     7.   Lavatory

     8.   Place to insert an electric plug

     9.   No-holds-barred (two words hyphenated)

    10.   Prevaricate (3 wds.) George Washing said he'd never ______  ____   ______.

    11.   Excite the imagination

    12.   Snitch

Answer Keys

   

    1.  little

    2.  latte

    3.  title

    4.  allot

    5.  lotto

    6.  to let

    7.  toilet

    8.  outlet

    9.  all-out

    10.              tell a lie

    11.              titillate

    12.              tattletale

Dr. J's Diary Episode # 37. Edna’s life bombed by her husband

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or support groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come across were the paths through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own life, being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life….or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.






Episode # 37. Edna’s life bombed by her husband



Edna had bitter years since her husband left her for good. It was not divorce or separation due to some cacophony in their marriage. Peter was all the man she had until the night she heard the most unbelievably devastating news from NPR on her way back home from work. “Around 5:30 this afternoon, there was a huge detonation of a bomb at a concert hall downtown Los Angeles where hundreds of people gathered for celebrating the end-of-the-year with classical music. More than 50 people reportedly died on the spot. The suspect of the bombing in this murder-suicide has been identified as a 35 year-old man named Peter Ashraf who’s been allegedly associated with terrorist groups….” Edna could not believe her ears. ‘Peter Ashraf….in this murder-suicide?......what the hell have I heard? Oh, God….’

Since the nightmarish incident that shocked the whole country and the world as well, Edna had run the gamut of emotions. Anger, frustration, despair, sense of betrayal, and sympathy as his spouse. One day she had inexplicable furor against her husband who had kept his devilish plan under the hat all along, and the next day she pitied her beloved man who had to end up
victimizing his life in the name of extremist Islamist beliefs without telling his wife about it. She thought over and over again about why and how Peter came to be a part of that secret terrorist group and eventually put his own life on the front line, masterminding the whole incident in his own community. Our weekly

---

therapy meetings at my office along with prescribed sleep aids, Xanax, Zoloft did not work to help ease off the melee in which Edna had been forced to be situated. She would resort to some scotch on the rocks on most of her sleepless nights, which was not of any help for her to carry on. Her questions in our therapy sessions always came down to one thing. Trust. “Dr. J, I’ve been wondering night and day since Peter was gone….if I was not a safe person for him to confide in. Hadn’t he trusted me at all? Did he ever think that I’d report him and his evil plans?....He knew me so well. He must have thought that I’d talk him out of it all.” I could not agree with her more. It was not that Peter didn’t love her. To the man, this crooked conviction to save his own race and religious faith in someone else’s country was too strong to hold back or put aside for the sake of his own pleasant life. Edna and I both knew this, but kept silent. Truth always cuts like a knife, and this silence in the middle of our conversations filled my office so loud and painfully. 

As a doctor, I am not supposed to take the attitude of a revisionist historian or impose any of my guessing like 20/20 hindsight on my patient. Edna’s sad eyes at the end of our meetings still linger on in my mind, which bring back my late wife Demi’s words in our days of hell. “Have you ever tried to see what was going on in me? Were you there with me even once when I was struggling to survive this deadly depression?” I was lost for words back then and even now with my own patient. I can't be a Jedi in anyone's life, but feel helpless being no help in them. Shame on me.










Expressions

    

    1.  cacophony: harsh or jarring sound : dissonance

    2.  murder-suicide: a double act in which a person kills one or more others before killing him- or herself

    3.  to run the (whole) gamut of…: experience, display, or perform the complete range of something

    4.  to keep ….under the hat: to keep …. a secret

    5.  extremist: a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views, especially one who resorts to or advocates extreme action

    6.  to mastermind something: to act as the leader of some complex plan or scheme

    7.  melee: confused fight/ skirmish/ scuffle

    8.  to confide in somebody: tell someone about something very private or secret

    9.  to talk someone out of something: persuade someone not to do (something unwise).

    10.              revisionist historian:  someone who examines and tries to change existing beliefs about how events happened or what their importance or meaning is

    11.              20/20 hindsight: Choices that seemed difficult in the past now seem clear after the person knows what happened as a result of those choices. This expression comes from the way people describe good vision. A person with normal, good vision has 20/20 sight. Hindsight is an understanding of a past event.

---

 [SH1]

Matching the 50 US States and their Nicknames

Can you guess the nicknames for the 50 US States? Why don’t we give it a try? 
FYI, I have lived in the Golden State, the Prairie State, and am currently living in the Lone Star State. :) 

   1.    The Prairie State: 1. Kansas   2. Indiana   3. Illinois

   2.    The Aloha State:  1.  Hawaii   2. Louisianna   3. New Mexico

   3.    The Peach State: 1. Connecticut   2. Georgia   3. New York

   4.   The Lone Star State:  1. Texas   2. Indiana   3. Colorado

   5.   The Golden State: 1. California   2. Florida   3. New York

   6.   The Beehive State: 1. Oregon   2. Wisconsin   3. Utah

   7.   The Pelican State:  1. Louisiana   2. Massachusetts   3. Alabama

   8.   The Empire State: 1. New York   2. New Jersey   3. Florida

   9.   The Garden State: 1. Virginia   2. Vermont   3. New Jersey

  10.               The Sunshine State: 1. South Carolina   2. Florida   3. Alabama

  11.               The Grand Canyon State: 1. New Mexico   2. Colorado   3. Arizona

  12.               The First State: 1. Maryland   2. Rhode Island   3. Delaware

  13.               The Land Without Law or the Science State or the Land of Enchantment:

   1.   New Mexico    2. Montana   3. Nevada

  

  14.               The Last Frontier: 1. Washington   2. Alaska   3. Maine

  15.               The Hoosier State: 1. Indiana   2. Ohio   3. Pennsylvania

  16.               The Bluegrass State: 1. Arkansas   2. Kentucky   3. Tennessee

  17.               The North Star State or the Land of 10,000 Lakes:

   1.   Minnesota   2. South Dakota   3. Michigan

  18.               The Beef State or the Cornhusker State:

   1.   Nebraska   2. Kansas   3. Oklahoma

  

  19.               The Pine Tree State: 1. Vermont   2. Maryland   3. Maine

  

  20.               The Mount Rushmore State: 1. North Dakota   2. South Dakota   3. Oklahoma

  21.               The Mountain State: 1. Colorado   2. West Virginia   3. North Dakota

  

  22.               The Mother of Presidents or the Old Dominion State:

    1. Virginia   2. Tennessee   3. Alabama

  23.               The Cowboy State or the Equality State: 1. Kansas   2. Wyoming   3. Idaho

  24.               The Buckeye State: 1. Tennessee   2. Mississippi   3. Ohio

  25.               The Tar Heel State or the Old North State: 1. North Carolina   2. Missouri   3. Arkansas

  26.               The Palmetto State: 1, Mississippi   2. Maryland   3. South Carolina

  27.               The Ocean State:1. Rhode Island   2. Michigan   3. Maryland

  28.               The Keystone State: 1. Oregon   2. Pennsylvania   3. Vermont

  29.               The Volunteer State: 1. Vermont   2. Alabama   3. Tennessee

  30.               The Evergreen State: 1. Washington   2. Vermont   3. Wisconsin

  31.               The Peace Garden State: 1. Oklahoma   2. North Dakota   3. Colorado

  32.               The Centennial State: 1. Maryland   2. Colorado   3. Iowa

  33.               The Land of Opportunity or the Natural State:

1.   Alabama   2. Arkansas   3. Connecticut

  34.               The Constitution State or the Nutmeg State: 1. Connecticut   2. Maryland   3. Massachusetts

  35.               The Great Lakes State or the Wolverine State: 1. Michigan   2. Mississippi   3. Missouri

  36.               The Treasure State or the Big Sky State: 1. Missouri   2. Nevada   3. Montana

  37.               The Granite State or the Mother of Rivers: 1. Idaho   2. New Hampshire   3. Oregon

  38.               The Old Line State or the Free State: 1. Wisconsin   2. Nevada   3. Maryland

  39.               The Sunflower State: 1. Idaho   2. Iowa   3. Kansas

  40.               The Cheese State or America’s Dairyland  or the Badger State: 1. Wisconsin   2. Vermont   3. Oregon

  41.               The Beaver State: 1. Vermont   2. Oregon   3. Nevada

  42.               The Cotton State or the Heart of Dixie or the Yellowhammer State: 1. Oklahoma   2. Massachusetts   3. Alabama

  43.               The Green Mountain State: 1. Vermont   2. Delaware   3. Colorado

  44.               The Sooner State: 1. Mississippi   2. Oklahoma   3. Nevada

  45.               The Gem State: 1. Idaho   2. Indiana   3. Missouri

  46.               The Bay State: 1. Massachusetts   2. Iowa   3. Mississippi

  47.               The Show Me State: 1. Nevada   2. Mississippi   3. Missouri

  48.               The Magnolia State:1. Iowa   2. Mississippi   3. Nevada

  49.               The Hawkeye State: 1. Iowa   2. Nevada   3. Montana

  50.               The Silver State or The Sagebrush State or the Battle-born State: 1. Wyoming   2. New Jersey   3. Nevada

Answer Keys 

   1.    Illinois

    2.    Hawaii

    3.    Georgia

    4.    Texas

    5.    California

    6.    Utah

    7.    Louisiana

    8.    New York

    9.    New Jersey

   10.Florida

   11.Arizona

   12.Delaware

   13.New Mexico

   14.Alaska

   15.Indiana

   16.Kentucky

   17.Minnesota

   18.Nebraska

   19.Maine

   20.South Dakota

   21.West Virginia

   22.Virginia

   23.Wyoming

   24.Ohio

   25.North Carolina

   26.South Carolina

   27.Rhode Island

   28.Pennsylvania

   29.Tennessee

   30.Washington

   31.North Dakota

   32.Colorado

   33.Arkansas

   34.Connecticut

   35.Michigan

   36.Montana

   37.New Hampshire

   38.Maryland

   39.Kansas

   40.Wisconsin 

   41.Oregon

   42.Alabama

   43.Vermont

   44.Oklahoma

   45.Idaho

   46.Massachusetts

   47.Missouri

   48.Mississippi

   49.Iowa

   50.Nevada