A simple brainteaser that tests your math and pattern-identifying skills has left the internet baffled.
X users have tried their hand at finding a solution to a sequence that does not follow the written rules of arithmetic and requires a bit of outside-of-the-box thinking.
At first glance, the prompt appears to be nothing more than four basic addition problems, with all of them already solved except the last one.
But these are no ordinary equations, as the three that are pre-answered are blatantly incorrect based on the laws of addition you most likely learned in elementary school.
So the key to solving this math puzzle is not necessarily getting the right answer, but getting the right wrong answer.
In order to do so, you have to identify what all the numbers to the right of the equal sign have in common.
Out of the nearly 300 people that shared their final answers in the comment section of Bholanath Dutta’s Monday post of the teaser, only a handful landed on the true response.
Many who got it wrong seemed to have an understanding of what had to be done – but ultimately flopped in their execution. Below is the mind twister, give it a try before reading on:
The first step in getting to the bottom of the baffling equations is to find a commonality between the four.
One user pointed out that each of the sums are 20 less than the next: 32 + 20 = 52, 52 + 20 = 72.
Using that logic, the correct answer would be 92 – but there is critical mistake with this method.
The person who suggested adding 20 to each of the solutions failed to consider what is on the left of the equal signs.
There seems to be a trend: the reading the numbers of the first three equations straight down, they go in chronological order: 11, 12, 13 and 12, 13, 14.
This is a trick as the fourth row breaks this pattern, skipping 14 + 15 and jumping straight to 15 + 16. Many users did catch on to this, confidently sharing their answer of 112.
But that still is not the proper solution here.
The bona fide process begins with taking a step back and ignoring the given answers, solving the addition problems as you usually would: 11 + 12 = 23, 12 +13 = 25, 13 + 14 = 27 and 15 + 16 = 31.
Notice anything yet?
The legitimately correct answers to the first three equations have the same digits as the prewritten sums given in the original post – just swapped in order.
So, 23 became 32, 25 became 52 and 27 became 72.
When this logic is applied to the equation, you finally get the answer to this mathematical riddle: 13.
‘Upon analysis, I discovered a hidden pattern: Add the two numbers on the left side. Reverse the digits of the sum to get the result on the right side,’ one user simply put it.