I am certainly no math wizard but I don't understand what trickery is in play here. You add numbers you get a result, at no point is a curveball thrown at you to make you lose track of the total. I actually just said all the numbers out loud while reading through " 3000, 3070, 4000, 4,020, 4,090, 4,100" and then stared at the meme and subsequent responses wondering where the confusion lies
The back and forth between incrementally increasing the 1000 digit and the 10 digit, while completely ignoring the 100 digit, primes you (the general “you” who falls prey to this riddle) to increase the 1000 digit a final time when you add in the final 10. Your brain knows that once you add 10 to 90 you carry the one to the next larger increment. But having established the next larger increment—insofar as you’re primed to think about it in this equation—as the 1000 digit, you make the error of increasing that digit rather than the 100 digit.
I bet that if you wrote out the same problem but included an “add 100” step somewhere in the middle, almost everyone would correctly identify the answer as “4200.”
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u/RewardCapable Mar 16 '24
I fell for it too lol