Are you smarter than an 8-year-old?
A US mum has shared a photo of a maths question from her third-grade child’s homework to Reddit – and it’s left the internet collectively scratching their heads.
Not only does it appear that the child’s homework is insanely long (there’s at least 45 questions!) but it seems the maths query in question doesn’t actually have a clear answer.
Question 44 reads: “Janell had 15 marbles. She lost some of them. How many does Janell have now?”
Neither mum Dusty Sappington, who posed the photo of the question, nor the 800 internet users who commented could say for sure what the correct answer is.
One popular comment suggested that the correct answer is “< 15” (less than 15).
However, if you want to be technical, the answer isn’t absolutely correct as it would include negative numbers of marbles — which would be impossible.
So the real answer is closer to “0 < x < 15”.
Even so, it’s unlikely the third grade teacher would have set such a difficult question so perhaps the answer is, as some commentators suggested, is simply “some”.
What’s more likely though is the teacher who set the homework left out the vital information in the question. Perhaps they need to find their own marbles?
The mother updated Reddit saying her daughter has yet to receive the marked homework back.
“I haven’t found out the answer, but hope to see her graded paper soon,” she wrote.