This puzzle is seriously confusing people on the internet right now. There are two possible answers, but you'll need an IQ of 130 or above to be able to find either of them.
The thing is, a lot of us look at the puzzle and immediately assume that the answer must be 19. I mean, 8+11 is literally 19, right?
Well, in any other mathematical context that would be the correct answer. But in this particular sequence, it is 100 per cent wrong.
How? Well, you'd only be able to figure that out by working out the pattern which determines the previous answers.
Take another look at the equations and try to find the patterns for yourselves.
Aside from the obvious yet incorrect answer of 19, there are two possible answers.
Scrutinise the sequence and determine what the solutions are before scrolling down for the answer.
Solution one method:While 1+4=5 makes total sense from a mathematical point of view, the second and third equations are much trickier to decipher. 2 and 5 don't make 12 and 3 and 6 don't make 21.
The supposedly incorrect equations are based on this pattern:
Add the numbers being added in any given equation to the answer of the previous equation:
For instance, the answer of the first equation is 5 and so 5 is added to 2+5, meaning the answer is indeed 12.
The first equation cannot be added to a previous answer because there is no previous answer. So in this case, you would add 0 to 1+4.
If you apply the same rule to the 8+11 equation, you should get the answer 40.
Solution two method:Solution two initially uses the first pattern but results in an entirely different answer.
This is the pattern solution two relies on:
You may have noticed that the first three equations create a consecutive sequence (1,2,3).
And the second half of the equations also follow a consecutive patter (4,5,6).
However, this consecutive sequence seems to come to an abrupt end with 8+11=? equation.
But you have to imagine that some of the equations have been taken out of the sequence, as shown in the illustration below:
So to find the second solution, we initially use the same method we used for Solution one method.
We added the previous answer to the equation we were trying to work out. And for 2+5 and 3+6 we get the same answers as in the Solution One method.
However, based on the 'omitted' equations, you should work out that 77 is added to 8+11 to make 96.
So the answers to this mind-bending puzzle are either 40 or 96.
