ARP 9 – We Don’t Get Fooled Again
As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks.
Every sack had seven cats.
Every cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks and wives:
How many were going to St.
Ives?
Try to figure it out first, then scroll down for the answer.
The correct answer is 2403. If you got 2402, you did the math right, but forgot about
the first line—the writer was going, too.
Everyone gets pulled off track by the words sometimes, especially in reading questions.
They make assumptions about what they’re supposed to be looking for, run off looking
for it, then discover that they were looking for the wrong thing. Oops.
Here’s another example:
Which is correct: ―Nine and seven is fifteen‖ or ―Nine and seven are fifteen?‖ If you
chose ―are,‖ you’re right on the grammar, but you overlooked the math: nine and seven
are sixteen. That’s a perfect example of looking for the wrong thing because you
misunderstood the question.
Sometimes we look for the wrong thing because our assumptions are wrong. Can you
solve this puzzle?
A doctor is about to operate on a little boy. “This boy is my son,” exclaims the doctor.
The doctor is correct, yet the doctor isn’t the boy’s father. What’s going on?
The doctor is the boy’s mother. Since surgeons are mostly male, we make the
assumption that this one must be male.
Here’s another:
Two men play five games of checkers, and each wins the same number of games.
There are no ties. How can this be?
Well? The answer is that they’re not playing one another. Sometimes reading more
into the sentence than what’s actually there serves as an obstacle to understanding.
Use what you know. Read carefully without overthinking. Use your common sense and
don’t make unsupported assumptions.
One more for fun:
A rope ladder hangs over the side of a ship. The
ladder is twelve feet long, and the rungs are one
foot apart, with the lowest rung resting on the
surface of the ocean. The tide is rising at six
inches an hour. How long will it take before the
first three rungs of the ladder are underwater?