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Comment by lordgrenville | Hacker News Reader

"Any eighth-grade boy or girl who is 'all there' should solve it in about thirty seconds" is hyperbole (it took me a couple of minutes), but in general the public reaction to this seems like a demonstration of the Flynn effect.

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> it took me a couple of minutes

Are you in the 8th grade? Those of us a couple of decades past the 8th grade are maybe slower at algebra than someone who is actively drilling it...

I must be getting old as well because I had to write it down in a piece of paper to do it, but I did get it pretty quick.

This is more a test of reading comprehension than algebra. Figuring out what the questions is even trying to ask is like 90% of the question.

When I was that age, we practiced a lot of word problems. The folks who wrote the tests really favoured this kind of slightly underhanded logic

They aren't allowed to make the mathematics too difficult so they make up for it by making the questions hard to understand.

Couple of minutes to understand the english, and an editor to write the formulas :-)

Not the Flynn effect; just people having fun, and selection bias. I (the blogger) deliberately left out many boring responses, except for linking to the Evening World's letters page of 1903-11-11.[1] I filtered out scores of replies from schoolchildren walking through the algebra to get the correct answer, and dozens of (usually short) replies from people of various ages giving wrong answers with and without reasoning, some almost certainly joking, some almost certainly not. But that's what you should expect from a Letters to the Editor section on any given math meme! Our discourse hasn't changed that much over 120 years. See my other post,[2] linked at the bottom of the current one, on "What is 8÷2(2+2)?" — that's not as fair a question, but the discourse is pretty much the same in unfiltered Letters-to-the-Editor sections: "I think it's X. Well, I think it's Y."

The whole point of this kind of meme is for the populace to perform disagreement about the answer! (See also: the Monty Hall problem; sports; comments sections.)

[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030193/1903-11-11/ed-1/?sp=...

[2] - https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2019/08/01/what-is-8-divi...

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