Tricky-looking brainteaser is easy... can you solve in 50 seconds? (2025)

A baffling mind twister requires outside-of-the-box thinking and keen pattern-identifying skills to get to the bottom of it.

You do not have to be amathematician to figure out the series of equations involved in this brainteaser make no sense.

This numerical riddle shows a pattern of addition equations before asking you to take a crack at an unsolved one.

But it is obvious that, considering the basic laws of math, each one of the sums is blatantly incorrect.

Adding to the what appears to be arithmetic nonsense, the answers do not have a particular sequence to them either.

In order to solve what seems to be unsolvable, you must figure out how to manipulate the two numbers on the left of the equal sign to get the number on the right.

Even though it may not seem like it, there is a common mathematical trend between the four solved addition problems - and it is actually quite simple.

Put your thinking cap on and give the deceiving brain puzzle below a try before reading on. Don't forget to set your timer to 50 seconds!

The first step to swapping out the question marks with a solution is to backtrack and figure out the relationship between the actual sums in the left side of the equation and the answers in the riddle.

Adding them up gives you the following sums: 2 + 3 = 5, 6 + 5 = 11, 7 + 2 = 9 and 8 + 4 = 96.

Now that you have the mathematically accurate sums - 5, 11, 9 and 96 - you must use these numbers to get to the ones already on the right of the equal sign.

In order to do so, a different operation than addition must be employed: multiplication.

When you multiply the correct sum by the first number in each equation, you get the numbers you are looking for: 2 x 5 = 10, 6 x 11 = 66, 7 x 9 = 63 and 8 x 12 = 96.

In algebraic terms, the method to apply to this multi-variable problem is (a+b) X a.

With that in mind, add the two numbers together and multiply that total by the first number of the equation to solve 9 + 5.

After solving (9 + 5) X 9, or adding together 9 and 5 and multiplying the sum by 9, you get 126 - the long awaited final answer.

This brainteaser was shared on X on Monday by a user called Break the Silos. However, not many internet users were brave enough to try their hand at this problem.

Out of the three commenters, two of them landed on the correct answer.

Add your comment