There’s a new brainteaser causing headaches around the Internet as this children’s puzzle combines simple math and not-so-simple visual trickery.
The image has been doing the rounds on Facebook challenging people to work out the values of the fruits shown. But no one can agree on the answer.
It seems straightforward enough. If three apples are equal to 30, the apple’s value is 10. Keep bullying your brain and you’ll see that bananas must be worth 4, and coconuts 2. With us so far?
So the final equation, testing our weary grey matter, coconut plus apple plus banana, is simply 2 + 10 + 4. So the answer should be 16, right? Wrong.
As many eagle-eyed social media users have spotted, there’s only one coconut in the final equation and, above, we’ve worked out that two coconuts equals 2.
It gets worse as people point out that there’s only three bananas in the final bunch, instead of four shown previously. Ouch.
So is the answer 15, or 16, or 14? Or are you just hungry and confused?
Annoyingly, according to one mathematician, there is no definitive answer to the riddle.
Dr Kevin Bowman, course leader for Mathematics at the University of Central Lancashire told the Daily Mail: “You can interpret it in many ways; one way is no more correct than another. There’s no ambiguity in the first equation; 3 apples is 30, so one apple is worth 10. But because all the bananas aren’t the same, you could say that they all represent different amounts.”
“You might even say that the two coconut pieces in the third equation are different sizes, and therefore add up to three quarters or even seven eighths when put together. In that sense, there are an infinite amount of possible answers.”
Confused? So are we. We just want the Facebook brainteasers to end and the pain in our heads to stop.