CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2013 - Solutions

1A. Old Chairman of the Farm

As hinted at by the title, this puzzle is based on the Old MacDonald Had a Farm song, and in particular pairs of things that make the same sound. Each animal inside the animal pen can be paired with a non-animal (either inside or outside). The phrasing of some of the objects is a bit odd unless you get the connection to the song. To give an example:

Old MacDonald had a farm,
E-I-E-I-O
And on that farm he had a [dodgy medical centre/duck]
E-I-E-I-O
With a quack quack here
And a quack quack there
Here a quack
There a quack
Everywhere a quack quack

The full set of pairs are:

• Duck (quack) Dodgy Medical Centre
• Sheep (baa/bar) Pub Crawl
• Dog (woof/"woof") Low-Pitched Speaker
• Mouse (squeak) Rusty Door
• Lion (roar/raw) Uncooked Meat
• Snake (hiss) Leaking Gas Pipe
• Horse (neigh/nay) Negative Voters
• Bird (tweet) Twitter Addict
• Cow (moo/muumuu) Hawaiian Dress Shop

Having found all the pairs, you need to draw lines between them. When you do, you will get the following:

If you look at it long enough, hopefully you see a cat staring back at you. There's one more connection between an animal and something else to make. Looking back at the title, the word "chairman" stands out as an odd choice. A famous chairman who also sounds like the noise a cat makes is the answer: MAO.

Also accepted was MEOW, along with a variety of alternative spellings of the sound: MIAOW, MIAOU, MEW.