Today, I learned that:

There are two blind men who go shopping, and what is the one thing that you most often have to go and buy when you go shopping when you’re a man? It’s usually socks because you put them into the wash and one of them disappears. And even though they are both blind it turns out that their wives like them to wear coloured socks and their wives like variety. So together, they go off and buy five pairs of socks each; a blue pair, a red pair, a pink pair, a green pair, and an orange pair. Now, the shop assistant finds this a somewhat eccentric purchase and gets slightly muddled and puts all ten pairs of socks into the same bag and they leave the shop, and one of them has got a bag with ten pairs of socks, the other has no socks.

Shortly before going their separate ways and going home and showing their socks proudly to their wives and saying, ‘Look what I’ve bought today,’ they realise that one of them has got all the socks. They say, my God, how can we sort out this problem so that each of us has one blue pair, one red pair, one pink pair, one green pair, and one orange pair? The question is the following: how do the two blind men achieve this goal without their wives helping them, without the socks being of different lengths, without the socks having any different texture or whatever? As far as the blind men are concerned they wouldn’t be able to tell the blue pair from the red pair. But how would they ensure that they could divide the socks up so that each of them would have two blue socks, two red socks, two pink socks, two green socks, and two orange socks ?

There is a very simple solution to the problem. I will give you time until Sunday, two whole days, to try and solve it.

Update 2016-02-21: A solution to this riddle can be found on Solution to riddle # 1 (Two blind men).

Refs.:

+: What did you learn in school today ?