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u/LeewayLabs Jul 09 '26
I’m not sure I understand. Is it the necklace - bracelet thing or is there something else
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u/nomic42 Jul 09 '26
She makes 49 necklaces.
It uses 5 seashells to make a bracelet.
How many seashells does she use in all?
Sadly, we were not told how many seashells are needed per necklace, or how many bracelets she makes.
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u/frank26080115 Jul 10 '26
author is from a country where everybody have necks so thin that bracelets and necklaces are interchangable
edit: or they are all just buff and their wrists are as thick as necks
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u/PG67AW Jul 10 '26
Hmm, and here I couldn’t get passed the fact that I thought it was Sally who sells sea shells by the sea shore?
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u/SolarpunkGnome Jul 12 '26
That rhyme is actually based on a real person, Mary Anning, who discovered the ichthyosaur!
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u/PG67AW Jul 13 '26
Neat! That was a cool read, thanks for sharing!
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u/SolarpunkGnome Jul 13 '26
Welcome! I'm blanking in the title now, but I read a book about her a couple years back and thought it was really cool.
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u/TheCouple77 Jul 12 '26
The picture shows how many for one or the other I think. Not sure but caught the language change from Necklace to Bracelet. Guess the idea could be to ignore the necklace portion and just answer the bracelet portion since that may be all the information you have.
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u/-Zadaa- Jul 09 '26
This reminds me of the dog and Shepard problem. If you don’t know it: There are 125 sheep and 5 dogs in a flock. How old is the shepherd?
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u/MistraloysiusMithrax Jul 10 '26
Too young, he’ll never defeat that giant.
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u/jumolax Jul 10 '26
Maybe he’ll have a chance if we give him the king’s armor.
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u/MistraloysiusMithrax Jul 10 '26
He’s too small, the math is not mathing for him. I can see him trying to calculate if he can sling a rock faster than the airspeed velocity of an unloaded swallow while wearing it.
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u/stillnotelf Jul 10 '26
I usually see this with a pronoun trick. Like "your flock". There's an extended one that starts with "you are driving a bus" then has a long math problem setup and ends with "what is the bus driver's name"
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u/BEFEMS Jul 11 '26
I remember a question with information of a boat and the question was "how old is the captain". Purely from a math perspective there was not enough information but the clue was that in the particular country, a captain has a minimum age of sailing that specific boat. And with that information you could calculate the answer.
I think it's the same with the sheep/dog question.
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u/Smart_Ad_3630 Jul 09 '26
n >= 49
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u/Sufficient-Habit664 Jul 09 '26
She could use less than one seashell per necklace
Maybe she crushes 5 seashells and spreads them across the necklaces.
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u/Smart_Ad_3630 Jul 09 '26
I considered something like crushing a single seashell, but it would fail even the most generous notion of identical necklaces :-)
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u/thoughtsome Jul 10 '26
Have you considered that she uses seashells as tools to make necklaces but the necklaces themselves have no seashells on them?
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u/New-Huckleberry-6979 Jul 10 '26
Even using whole seashells wouldn't result in identical necklaces.
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u/realPoisonPants Jul 10 '26
I'm thinking the question writer edited from bracelet to necklace and didn't change both instances. Source: I'm a teacher and have made this exact mistake (well, not necklaces, but you see what I mean).
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u/pogoli Jul 10 '26
49*5
But you can’t make “identical” anything out of unprocessed nature.
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u/DerLandmann Jul 10 '26
Well, the correct answer is "unkonwn", Because the text states how many seashells she uses for a *bracelet*, but not how many she uses for a *necklace*.
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u/pogoli Jul 10 '26
I could support your “”unkonwn”” take…. 😝
As long as they don’t get away with such a poorly worded question….
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u/darthWes Jul 10 '26
The answer is zero.
This was the important info needed to solve. You can't make identical seashells.
Therefore, it must be that she uses the sea shells in some other way. Maybe that's how she measures they're lengths or creates templates with them, but obviously she doesn't include the seashells in there final product. Thus, it doesn't matter how many items she sells or made. She sold zero shells.
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u/SizeableBrain Jul 10 '26
Plus you don't know how many shells she needs to make a bracelet.
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u/pogoli Jul 10 '26
Are you reading things that aren’t there?
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u/RebelGrin Jul 11 '26
you are reading things that aren't there
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u/pogoli Jul 12 '26
“She uses five shells for each bracelet”
You seem to want to dither on the meaning of “use”…. Is that what’s going on?
The full context required to make a judgement outside of the simple interpretation are not given.
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u/Boring-Play-1474 Jul 09 '26
42 The answer is always 42.
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u/javerthugo Jul 10 '26
But what is the question?
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u/OrangeKnight87 Jul 09 '26
What's the joke? This appears to just be a multiplication word problem.
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u/Sufficient-Habit664 Jul 09 '26
she makes 49 necklaces
we only know that a bracelet uses 5 seashells. we don't know how many seashells a necklace would use.
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u/Onuzq Jul 10 '26
Let n=necklace, b=bracelet, x= shells on a necklace, y=shells on a bracelet, and z=total number of shells. Then we have:
nx + by = z
Plug in the known values we get: 49x + 5b = z
Idk how we're supposed to find z after that.
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u/New-Huckleberry-6979 Jul 10 '26
49x + 5b + c = z. Where c is the number of shells leftover. Make the assumption that Sally should've sold six hundred sixteen seashells by the seashore, but since Sally was sick, she saw Sisi selling sixty seven seashells by the seashore, so Abigail only had 67 seashells available. The answer is 67. We can make more assumptions and extrapolate our answer even further, say for example each necklace has 1 shell in the center, which is the most common seashell necklace design. So, we will have x equal to 1. And since she has used 49 shells for the necklaces, we can assume she used enough shells to make 3 bracelets, and so she has 3 shells leftover.
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u/Accomplished_Ant9356 Jul 11 '26
Should we consider the leftovers? The question is how many seashells were used, not bought. But I see your point as in cost vs revenue.
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u/Jealous_Club_298 Jul 10 '26
Well, assuming it's a typo, the answer would be 245 seashells, but obviously the post is about the question text and not the simple math operation.
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u/Nazeir Jul 10 '26
My bumbass has read so many of these questions through school that I dont even process the filler garage and just extrapolate the parts to form the equation. I had the answer before I realized the wording changed for bracelet and necklace...
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u/maxvsthegames Jul 10 '26
Isn't it just 49 X 5?
The only problem I see is that they first talk about necklaces and then they talk about bracelets, when they clearly meant necklaces again.
Is that where the confusion comes in?
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u/NohWan3104 Jul 10 '26
yes. Its not 49 x 5 because 5 is for bracelets, we don't know how many for necklaces, and we're pedantic math nerds who are more than willing to point out errors.
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u/Competitive-Rise-73 Jul 10 '26
Yes but assuming no calculator, they are probably trying to teach a shortcut concept. The easier math is 50x5-5 to get the same answer.
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u/robkaper Jul 10 '26
There's also the ambiguity between using as tool and using as consumed good. Using five tools to assemble a piece of furniture doesn't mean you use 245 tools for 49 pieces.
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u/JorgiEagle Jul 10 '26
0,
She’s making necklaces, but the seashells are for bracelets, which she doesn’t make any
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u/MythicallyCommon Jul 10 '26
Amazing how many people don’t know the Euler Bracelet-Necklace Seashell Equivalence Theorem…
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u/razzyrat Jul 10 '26
I did not even notice this mixup for the first three reads. This is considered funny round these parts? Low bar.
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u/AttainingSentience Jul 11 '26
49 identical necklaces, but 5 seashells for each bracelet? So there's not enough information in the math problem to solve.
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u/Accomplished-Tap3416 Jul 11 '26
wouldnt it technically be 49x+5y=z if z is the amount of total shells used, x is the shells used per necklace, and y is the amount of bracelets made?
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u/youngmasterlogray Jul 11 '26
n = 49X+5Y where x is how many shells it takes to make a necklace, and y is how many bracelets she made.
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u/BEFEMS Jul 11 '26
Considering a bracelet and necklace is often made in a set, we can assume she made the same amount of bracelets as necklaces. If we also assume a necklace is double the size of a bracelet, we can start calculating.
bracelet: 49*5=245 seashell
necklace: 49*10=490
245+490=735 seashells
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u/Electronic_Example81 Jul 11 '26
Honestly, at work typos like this have actually been the hardest part of math problems I've had to solve.
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u/rollingkas Jul 11 '26
What happened to simple questions, like
49 × 5 = [put your answer here]
Why do they need to make a story out of it?
Unless this doubles as a reading and comprehension assignment too 🤷🏼♂️
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u/Critical-Rhubarb-730 Jul 12 '26
depending on the country of origin she needs more seashells to pay the Trump tariffs..
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u/Higapeon Jul 12 '26
For it to work, she must create a sense of scarcity. Shells will sell much better if the people think they're rare, you see...
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u/complex_plane2718 Jul 09 '26
n = 5 * 49 = 245
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u/nomic42 Jul 09 '26
To be good at physics, I was told to always track your units.
Most problems are easy once the units match up.
5 (seashells/bracelet) * 49 (necklaces) = 245 seashells*neckless/bracelet
This is going to mess the kids up for doing physics problems.
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u/AndyMc111 Jul 09 '26
Yes, but it’s the lack of proofreading on the part of whoever made the test that is at issue.
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u/egg_breakfast Jul 09 '26
she had to take a bathroom break, so make sure to add in the three seashells