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Math riddles
A farmer has 17 sheep, and all but 9 run away. How many are left?
A word problem with a phrase that means the opposite of what it seems to say. If you treat it as arithmetic you will subtract when you should simply read.
A farmer has 17 sheep, and all but 9 run away. How many are left?
Hint: Read “all but” slowly.
Reveal the answer
Nine
“All but 9” means 9 of them stayed.
How to solve it (spoilers)
How to think about it
- The eye catches 17 and 9 and wants to compute 17 − 9 = 8.
- Look at the exact phrase: “all but 9 run away”. “All but” means “all except”.
- So every sheep except 9 ran off. The 9 are the ones that did not run.
- Nine sheep are left; the 8 that ran away are gone.
Why “Nine” is the answer
The phrase “all but 9” means that 9 sheep stayed and the rest left, so 9 remain. The subtraction 17 − 9 = 8 gives the number that ran away, which is the opposite of what the question asks. Once you translate “all but” into “except”, the arithmetic becomes unnecessary.
Common wrong answers
- Eight. Eight is how many ran away, not how many stayed.
- Seventeen. That would mean none ran away, but the riddle says all but nine did.
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