How’s your train of thought?
Because you’re about to hate trains and thinking about anything ever, ever again. And probably people. Stupid, grown-up people.
Featured in a maths test for seven-year-olds, the question asked juniors to work out the amount of people who set off on a train based on the amount of people who got on and off at a stop. So far, so maths test...
The question:
Easy, you might think, but apparently the Internet in it's eternal glory doesn't do easy, instead they do Gold Dress levels of doubt.
First appearing on Facebook page Parents against Primary Testing, users claimed to be left in the dark by this arithmetic puzzle when the teacher apparently ‘left her answer sheet at school’, with the befuddled lot split in two camps: a) 63 - 17 = 46, and b) 63 - 17 + 19 = 65.
Clearly, it doesn't take Stephen Hawking to work out the correct answer (Ed. the answer is 65 the reason for this is that it's clearly 65) but we do admit the teacher's poor wording of the question doesn't exactly help (it does, it says that the answer is 65).
Or perhaps that was the teacher's plan all along, hoping to give out this ticking time bomb of a maths question and watch the world implode on itself in a cloud of mathematical angst because they can't grasp that the answer is 65.
These people are probably on an actual train as we speak, hopefully going far far away, with 65 people on board, every single one of them astonished at new world discoveries like fire and the number 65...
