By: Sammy Wang

Recently my friend gave me a seemingly easy math problem for me to solve. It looks easy at first glance, but looks can deceive you. After coming up with your first answer, you may think it’s over…but it’s not if you decide to double check. You then realize that something with the math doesn’t add up. Below is the math problem I am talking about.

Together, a book and a newspaper cost $11.00. The book costs $10.00 more than the newspaper. How many newspapers could you buy for the same price as the book?

With a quick glance at this problem, many students may come up with the answer of 10 or 11 books even though the answer is far from that.

One of my classmates came up with the conclusion that the book would be 10 dollars, meaning that the newspaper would be just a dollar. But with a little more thinking it wouldn’t make sense.

In order for a book to cost 10 dollars more than a newspaper, it couldn’t have been 10 dollars and a dollar respectively. That would mean that the book only cost 9 dollars more.

When I was first given this problem, it challenged and stressed me, but I ultimately cracked the code to solve it. Even though I had the (wrong) answer at first, I was tempted to just leave it at that. But something about my answer, which was 10, just didn’t seem right to me, something about it just didn’t feel right. I was later able to solve it, nott just with my head, but with a pencil.

After solving it, it is easy to see where students messed up on the problem.

So what did I learn from this? Always do your math problems on paper because sometimes you can’t trust your brain.