You are driving a bus. You go east 12 miles, and turn south and go 2 miles and take on 9 passengers, and then you turn west and go 3 miles and let off 4 passengers. How old is the bus driver?
***Give the youth a chance to answer the question and eventually ask one of them to explain the question and how to find the right answer***
The main problem that many people have when trying to answer this brain teaser is listening. A lot of the times, we latch onto certain information that we think is important in a question and then somehow, miss the most important part. When I first read this question earlier this morning, like many of you, I latched onto the directions (east, south, west), the distance and the number of passengers on the bus. Those are things that that are important right?
When I got to the end and it asked how old the bus driver is, I just was dumb founded. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “how are we going to find the age of the buss driver from the information given.” I took a minute and looked at the numbers are wondered if there was some secret message in the numbers and maybe, if you added them together or something, it would work. It wasn’t for a few moments that I finally realized that the clue to this teaser was a simple, three letter word that starts the whole question off. “YOU are the bus driver.”
How often is it though that we have this same problem with listening in real life? Your Mom asks you to do something and you aren’t quite paying attention and latter on you get in trouble for not doing what you were supposed to. You get your homework back from your teacher with a big fat F on it and when you inquire to your teacher, he tells you that you didn’t follow all the directions – directions you missed because you were talking with the cute boy behind you and weren’t listening to the teacher.