Parents left stumped by exam question for a 10-year-old kid
Are you smarter than a 10-year-old?
If they can get questions like this one you're about to tackle right then the answer might well be 'no', but have a crack at it and see if you can figure it out.
There's a lot of debate and discussion over whether exams are getting easier or if the education system is getting better at teaching.
You rarely hear people bragging about how exams were easier back in their day, but looking at what the youth of today has to deal with in their tests it might be time to plate up some humble pie.
Advert
One very difficult question left a whole load of parents stumped after Sky News presenter Anna Botting shared her daughter's maths homework and a fiendishly tough task.
The question read: "At the beginning of the day Hasim counted his money. He gave his brother 1/3 of his money. He spent £12 on a present for his sister. He then counted what he had left and it was half what he had at the beginning of the day. How much did he give his brother?"
We'll tell you the correct answer a bit further down but for now try and figure it out.
Remember that the question is asking for the value of the one-third of his money he gave to his brother and not how much money he had in the first place.
This one really had people stumped as they tried to put their grown-up brains to the test while they admitted it was 'definitely difficult for a 10-year-old".
Someone else said they 'can make no sense of that at all', while plenty of others got the incorrect answer as they hadn't read the question and instead thought they were supposed to work out the entirety of the original money.
Others who followed the 'show your method' instructions cracked out the algebra to crunch the numbers and figure out exactly what the question was asking of them.
One person suggested that with questions like this if you didn't know a number then you should 'replace it with a letter' and keep working on the problem.
If you've made it this far you've earned an answer and an explanation of how the question works, so we hope you haven't cheated and just scrolled down to this point.
The correct answer to the question is that Hasim gave his brother £24, and the way to work that out (or at least the way I did it) is to turn the one-third and one-half amounts into the same denomination, which gives you two-sixths and three-sixths.
That means the £12 Hasim spent represented the final sixth of the funds, meaning he started the day with £72, gave £24 to his brother, spent £12 on a gift for his sister and had £36 left over at the end of the day.
If you managed to get this one right then there's another maths question for 10-year-old pupils that you might want to have a crack at.
While there are some questions which are just baffling, some are slipped in by teachers who hope to catch their pupils cheating.
Joe Harker