Children’s maths question asking the closest time to midnight has people baffled

A children's maths question has really stumped some people out there.

Cast your mind back to your school tests and exams - can you feel that knot in the pit of your stomach? Are your palms getting a little sweaty?

Well, while you may have thought you'd left that anxiety in the past, someone has resurrected the fears of school kids the world over.

Taking to social media, someone going under the handle @yawdmontweet shared a snap of a question that had apparently been put together for pupils.

Posting the pic, the account admitted they had a tough time answering it, writing: "Jah know start diss a hurt mi head."

So what's the craic?

Twitter/@yawdmontweet

The question reads: "What is the closest time to midnight?"

The possible answers are: "A. 11:55 am, B. 12:06 am, 11:50 am, and D 12:03 am."

While it might seem like a pretty simple question - cough, obviously the answer is D, cough - there were plenty of people who struggled to work out.

Some suggested that it was, in fact, A because that was the closest to midnight without having the need of going back in time.

Others, however, suggested it was D because, well, it is.

Explaining the reasoning, one user said: "Clearly a lot of children have been left behind. The answer is D!!! 'To' just means closest to the time itself, not insinuating that it’s necessarily before midnight."

While another added: "The question speaks to proximity and not chronology, so the answer is D."

Someone even used the skills of ChatGPT to help get to the bottom of it.

After typing the question into the AI bot, it responded with: "The closest time to midnight would be D. 12:03am."

So I guess that's case closed, eh?

This isn't the first time adults have been stumped by a school exam, though. Oh no.

Reddit

Earlier this year, a 10-year-old's maths question bamboozled plenty of people.

A Grade 5 (which is equivalent to Year 6 in the UK) maths question recently shared on Reddit has left adults confused as it asks students to figure out how many pages are in a book.

“Klein read 30 pages of a book on Monday and one eighth of the book on Tuesday,” the question read.

“He completed the remaining quarter of the book on Wednesday. How many pages are there in the book?”

Many were utterly baffled by the question, with one person commenting: “And now we can all see why Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? worked as a game show.”

Topics: World News, Viral, Twitter

Dominic Smithers

Dominic Smithers is LADbible's Editorial Lead. After graduating from the University of Leeds with a degree in French and History, he went on to write for the Manchester Evening News, the Accrington Observer and the Macclesfield Express. So as you can imagine, he’s spent many a night wondering just how useful that second language has been. But c'est la vie.

@SmithersDom