A Reddit user posted a picture of his younger brother’s math homework and adults on the internet were losing sleep over this problem for 10-year-olds.
Many of us have cried over irritating math problems in our primary school days. Math problems looked particularly threatening as a child. As we grew up, those jumbling numbers might have started looking easier to some of us.
However, if you harbor a lifelong fear of mathematics, this primary school's math question made for 10-year-olds will definitely bug you. Reddit user u/springwaterh20 posted a picture of his younger brother's math homework and it made adults on the internet scratch their heads to solve it.
The caption read that it was "a test problem on my 5th-grade brother's Math exam." Is it really? Even if it is, educated adults are not having an easy time trying to find the solution to the problem.
The question—which is meant to be solvable by students aged between 10 to 11, mind you—asks one to figure out the number of pages a person has read in a book. "Klein read 30 pages of a book on Monday and 1/8 of the book on Tuesday. He completed the remaining 1/4 of the book on Wednesday. How many pages are there in the book?" the question reads.
Most baffled Reddit users gave up on solving the equation and stormed the comment section to confess that they will probably fail "fifth-grade math." u/657Boulevard had a simple solution to this equation and the user wrote: "Umm… 0... He finished reading it. No math is needed." u/Organic_Fisherman656 solved the problem but they had to face some hurdles. They wrote: "The answer is 48, but it took my 50+-year-old brain a minute, plus pen and paper to get there."
Another Reddit user u/ResultLong5307 was looking at this equation from a different angle and commented: "Even you are proving that point that this isn't a 5th-grade problem. What you just did was algebra with applications basically. Algebra isn't taught until 9th grade at least. So unless this is some super advanced AP class for 5th graders, this is not a math problem lol. And a lot of adults don't stay touched up on math once they finish max algebra 2 in college (not counting stem majors). So they for sure wouldn't get this either."
Well, if anyone is still trying to figure out the answer to this equation, it will be eight times six which means the book has a total of 48 pages.
In a similar story, a Chinese math exam question left the internet stumped. According to IFLSCIENCE, a 5th-grade-exam paper's question for students read as follows: "If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats onboard, how old is the ship's captain?" The Chinese education department said that they will continue to set up such questions in the future. Good for them, but we are sure glad that we didn't have to face these questions in our exams.
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