This puzzle is a golden oldie, with a simple but elusive answer.(Source: Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities by Ian Stewart)
The cocktail cherry is inside the glass, which is formed from four matches. Your task is to move at most two of the matches, so that the cherry is then outside the glass. You can turn the glass sideways or upside down if you wish, but the shape must remain the same.
Move two matches to extract the cherry.
The solution I came up with was to shift the horizontal match far enough to the right that its non-flammable end touches that of the lower vertical match and then take the left vertical match at the top and set it perpendicular to the flammable end of the horizontal match, so that it forms a new "side" of the glass. (Of course this process can also by started by shifting the horizontal match to the left and the answer will be symmetrical to the one obtained doing things how I did them.)
If that description was confusing—I wouldn't blame you for finding it thus—here's how it's portrayed in the solutions:
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