Puzzles

A farmer had 15 sheep, and all but 8 died. How many are left?

A farmer had 15 sheep, and all but 8 died. How many sheep does the farmer have left?

Reveal the answer

8. The wording is designed to trigger a reflexive subtraction (15 minus 8 equals 7), but 'all but 8 died' simply means 8 survived. It's one of four items added to the Cognitive Reflection Test in a 2014 update, designed to catch snap, unreflective answers rather than reward memorized responses to the original three-question test.

Maggie E. Toplak, Richard F. West and Keith E. Stanovich, Assessing Miserly Information Processing: An Expansion of the Cognitive Reflection Test — Thinking & Reasoning, 2014

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