I actually got to hate math in grade 3 with such problems. Nobody explained to me that I could just write down an equasion, at least my father (physicist) could not. And all I saw in the magazines were cryptic answers like "it's plain obvious that for Jose-Rammstein conjuncture, x = 10"

I also met the problem #9 at an interview, and was asked to write the solution in pseudocode, as a kind of fizz-buzz test. (A peasant must take a wolf, a goat and a cabbage across a river in a boat. However the boat is so small that he is able to take only one of the three on board with him. How should he transport all three across the river? The wolf cannot be left alone with the goat, and the goat cannot be left alone with the cabbage.)

> This is how you get kids to love math, if you do it right.

No. This is how you encourage kids who already love math. If they're not interested (yet), this is an awesome way to turn them off.

If you do it right, you'll incorporate these into everyday life (walk down the street, see something that you can turn into a similar problem, then pose that to the kid).

Source: loved these as a kid[1], now parent who wants to encourage a healthy sense of wonder in math/sciences.

[1] Here's one for you I loved back in the day: A hen and a half lay an egg and a half in a day and a half. How many eggs do six hens lay in six days?

Exactly. If the problem does not involve the "Aha! moment" the kids won't love it. And there's no way to have both "Aha!" and 90+% scores.

This particular word problem is a clever one that can be sold a with different mental models (variable in an equation, imagining a brick being split, and probably other ways I haven't thought of). But it's a dumb problem with no reasonable analogy to real life. Who weighs things in comparison to a fraction of themselves plus a basic weight unit? I wonder if the problem is confusing not because of the wording, but because people rely on inferred context to understand language. This context is asinine, so people might think, "Clearly, that cannot be the intended meaning. I must have misread it."

But the actual math in these is fairly trivial. The entire challenge is in deciphering the wording.

No, because this is written in broken English, and is ambiguous. If you want to make kids think that math is all about "ha, gotcha! Technically this question could be interpreted to mean X" then by all means this is an excellent question. Anyone with a basic understanding of English would have phrased the question differently, unless they were a Russian with a mediocre understanding of English syntax, or were purposely trying to be clever and ambiguous. Both are probably true in this case.

I could parse it fine but if I were writing this I would include more redundancy e.g. "weighs one pound and half the weight of the [maybe use our to suggest to the reader it's the same one] brick".

The well drilled student would be able to parse both but anyone who can struggle with getting the words into their head in the right order like me could struggle.

Exactly. It would read better as "The weight of a brick is equal to one pound plus the weight of half an equivalent brick"

i.e. x = 1 + x/2

in this case, the line between grammar and math is fuzzy - english (or russian) and mathematical symbols are two different languages here which are each capable of describing the same thing.

the challenge is to do the necessary translation and rearrangement

Replacing "the brick" with "a brick," I always thought the question was fine:

> A brick weighs one pound and half a brick.

I could easily imagine a brick being balanced by a one pound weight and a half brick on the other side, and the answer was easy.

I agree that "half the brick" is trickier wording.

That uses the wording "plus half a brick" instead of "plus half the brick." I think the "a brick" wording could be a little clearer for kids.