If three astronauts are in a canoe flying over the Gobi desert and they crash how many pancakes does it take to shingle a dog house?

Answer 1

The answer your professor wants to hear:

The answer is purple, because ice cream has no bones.

The premise "because ice cream has no bones" can also be used to justify any kind of conclusions that do not follow logically.

A premise is a statement that is offered in an effort to support a conclusion. A sound or cogent argument is made when a premise is offered that gives some degree of support to a conclusion. A fallacy is an argument in which the premises given for the conclusion do not provide an acceptable degree of support. In a fallacy, even if the premise is unequivocal (ice cream has no bones) the conclusion is not any more likely to be true. Fallacies are considered to be poor arguments because they contain an error in reasoning.

A red herring is a type of fallacy in which the premise is an irrelevant topic and is presented in order to divert attention from the original conclusion. While generally considered to be a poor argument, in the debate regarding the canoe and the pancakes I think that a red herring is probably the best tactic we can use considering the absurdity of the question. The question, the conclusion, and the premise for that matter are not important as long as the question is absurd and the premise is unequivocal.

Another example:
If a chicken-and-a-half laid an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, how long would it take a one-legged grasshopper to kick all the seeds out of a dill pickle?

The answer is 42, because a camel has hairy armpits. Are you seriously trying to tell me that a camel doesn't have hairy armpits?! I didn't think so!

More answers:

• It depends on how fast they were flying and the size of the dog
• None because a motorcycle has no doors
• 0 because Dairy Queen doesn't deliver on Wednesday but on Fridays and if a red shirt turns green you have seven dollars and if you subtract the price of happiness from the amount of purple in a pencil you will find out that your dog is actually a chinchilla so it will take 0 pancakes to shingle its roof because it has no roof
• 63 because John Lennon isn't from Scandanavia
• Yellow
• Where is Ted Kennedy on this day? Double the pancakes. Size of the dog house could also affect the hysteresis loop, propagating a negative slew rate, possibly causing the pancake effect. This is remedied by all pancake "roofers," no pun intended, to eat said pancakes prior to "roofing." The slew rate will get through the hysteresis loop, validating good shingles. That is all the clarification you need.
• Banana
• Ive got a lovely bunch of coconuts. Didily dee dee. Here they are standing in a row. Bum bum bum. Big ones small ones some as big as YOUR head!!!! So my answer would have to be...................Grape.

• Well presuming that the desert is a hallucination and the canoe is a box in your mother's basement and you are doing acid...I'm going to go with 9000 but just to be on the safe side I would bring 10,000 because you are gonna get the munchies ;)

• None silly! Not all the hobbits made it to Mordor!
• 42 is the answer, but this isn't the right question
• 104 because Kurt Cobain was murdered
• 96.352, because no one can find the last puzzle piece
• Ice Cream has no bones.
• Personally, I'd have to say that since the sky is blue not grape-flavored, that the number would have to be 81 and a quarter....and a nickel.
• Depends on the color of the dog house, whether or not the astronauts have bologna in their pants, and if the desert is painted yellow or blue. But since cows eat lemons, my answer is . . . coconut
• Well the answer is 7 because marshmallows don't have bones.
• More information needed: Are these African or European pancakes?
• Yes, because watermelons can't use night vision and have 10 foot Chihuahuas.
• I'd have to say hi, because the astronauts would crash in a purple-flowing river, with marshmallows, not pancakes.
• 369, the Mad Hatter gave the pen to the astronaut JGY whom wrote this on their shoes, "marsHmaLLOws don't have BonEs" and you know only a handful of people can answer this question in the whole wide world, Silly!
• I am fairly certain that the answer is in fact 18, because bananas can't moonwalk.

* My memory of this one is: There is a man rowing up the river without a paddle. Now, keeping that in mind, how many pancakes does it take to cover a roof? None, because you can't pick the bones out of ice-cream.