Think you’re good at math? There’s a short and sweet analytical puzzle that could prove you wrong.
At first glance the whole thing looks simple: you assign a numerical value to a bunch of fruit (in this case there are apples, bananas and coconuts). From there, you add or subtract the items to achieve a sum total.
The debate that’s raging across the Internet is whether the sum of the final line of the equation adds up to 14 or 16.
Confused? So are plenty of people.
So what’s going on? It turns out a whole bunch of visual trickery akin to the now infamous dress.
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The folks at Mashable summed the whole debate up best:
“Some believe that if a pair of coconut halves equals two, then a single coconut half must equal one. Similarly, they believe that if a bundle of four bananas equals four, then a bundle of three must equal three, leaving a final answer of 14.
Others believe that the coconut image always equals two, while the bundle of bananas image always equals four, regardless of changes in illustration. By this thinking, the answer is 16.”
Even though 14 and 16 are the most common answers we’ve seen on the web, there are plenty of other people who think the equation adds up to 15, 18 and even 30.
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Frustratingly, there’s no real answer to the riddle as the Daily Mail points out. They spoke to Dr. Kevin Bowman, a course leader for mathematics at the University of Lancashire, who had this to say: “You can interpret it in many ways; one way is no more correct than another. There are an infinite amount of possible answers.”
So who is right, and what do you see?