A FIENDISHLY tricky puzzle has got people scratching their heads.
The emoji-themed brain teaser asks you to solve an equation using the solution to three equations that have been completed for you.
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It’s a simple algebra problem that’s a lot trickier than it looks.
The puzzle has done the rounds on social media in the past and was recently shared on TikTok by a user who goes by @puzzlegame21.
Viewers are shown four emoji-based equations in total, three of which have already been solved.
The first shows that three taco emojis added together equals 60.
The second reveals that the sum of three salad emojis is 30.
And finally, three cucumber emojis added to one another is equal to 24.
The fourth equation is not solved for you – you’ve got to figure out the answer within 20 seconds to prove your mental prowess.
It asks you to combine the value of each emoji – which you can figure out using the previous equations – to get the solution.
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The puzzle reads: “[taco emoji] + [cucumber emoji] x [salad emoji]”.
Are you able to figure it out? The equation is tricky for two reasons.
Firstly, all of the other equations are addition only, making it easy to assume the final puzzle is addition only, too.
That would make the answer 38 (the taco’s value is 20, the salad’s is 10 and the cucumber’s is 8) but of course, that is not correct.
There’s a multiplication symbol hidden in there, which makes things a little more complicated.
The answer is 100. To get there, you add the taco (20) to the value of the salad (10) multiplied by the value of the cucumber (8).
That leaves you with 20 + (10 x 8), or 20 + 80 = 100.
In the comments, there was confusion among viewers as to whether the answer should be 100 or 280.
That’s the equation can also be read as (20 + 10) x 8. That leaves you with 30 x 8 = 280.
However, the rules of maths dictate that multiplication is performed before addition regardless of which appears first when reading left to right.
That means the equation reads 20 + (10 x 8), leaving 100 as the correct answer.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
