Which travels faster, heat or cold?

How to think about it

1. The question is phrased like a physics problem about the speed of heat transfer.
2. The hint says to think about catching something. What do people catch in winter?
3. You can catch a cold, but you can never catch heat.
4. If cold can be caught and heat cannot, heat must be faster.

Why “Heat, because you can catch a cold” is the answer

The joke runs on the idiom “catch a cold”: anything you can catch must be slow enough to catch, so cold is the slower one and heat travels faster. The logic is nonsense as science and perfect as wordplay. The riddle borrows the shape of a real question to set up the pun.

Common wrong answers

• Cold. Cold is the thing you catch, so by the riddle’s joke logic it is the slow one.
• They travel at the same speed. In physics heat flows and cold is just its absence, but the riddle is not asking about physics.