Eight-year-old’s maths homework question leaves everyone baffled

Maths can be a tricky subject and I’m sure we all spent some frustrated evenings trying to figure out some obtuse homework when we were younger.

However, I’m sure we’d all like to think we could answer an 8-year-old’s homework.

Well, now’s your chance, as you can try and figure out the answer to a question that mum Dusty Sappington uploaded to Reddit, after it was given to her daughter Izzy as homework.

u/L8asUsual / Reddit

Dusty circled the question, which asks: “Janell had 15 marbles. She lost some of them. How many does Janell have now?”

Izzy answered with a large question mark, which I feel is fair enough.

Well, it turns out that Janell wasn’t the only person losing some marbles, as people were left completely baffled by the question.

So far no one has been able to answer the question definitively, and while some Reddit users gave it a go nobody has been able to come up with a concrete answer.

Didsbury CE School

User kpflowers guessed ‘< 15’, before adding: “but I don’t think that’s a fair 3rd grade question.”

Redeye_Jedi1620 thought we needed more information, saying: “The answer is ‘not enough information.’ It probably says something in the instructions about that being a choice.”

Another user simply added: “Janell lost her marbles”.

Andy Falconer/Unsplash

Speaking to Huffington Post, Dusty wasn’t sure what had happened. She said: “To be honest, I’m unsure if it was printed in error or was a question to test her knowledge of less than and greater than, which she has touched on in the past.

“Being the mother of a third-grader and a fifth-grader, I have seen a lot of homework over the years that has our family laughing at the absurdities, scratching our heads and relying too much on Google.”

What do you reckon the answer is, then?