I'm stumped.

I watched a QUiz thing last night called QuizCall. The question was:

The number of:

number of legs on five horses

number of letters in the alphabet

numbers on a phone keypad

ADD ALL THE NUMBERS


Many calls came in, all wrong, and out of curiosity I taped the programme to find the answwer.

It ran for hours and hours, eventually they revealed the answer which was 10981

Can anyone work out how they arrived at that`figure???

Was this on a phone in "interractive" programme?

I haven't seen the programme you're referring to, but 've seen these sort of questions before. I think they are a bit of a rip off.

Its a trick really, because they don't add up just the obvious numbers, but also add up any component parts of numbers, any words in the question which are also numbers, any parts of longer words which are numbers (e.g. "ten" in the word tenticle) and any Roman numerals.

I can't be bothered to try and work out exactly how they got to that answer, but typically the answer would be derived by something like the following sum:

The obvious answer = 56
Then there is the word five in "five horses"
Then there are all the roman numerals = e.g. nuMber of legs on fIVe horses. nuMber of letters In the alphabet etc.

But they can also take it a stage further. The word "five" contains the roman numerals I (1) and V (5). This could be either I+V = 6 or it could be IV=4 or it could be IV=4 + I+V = 9.

They can manipulate the sum to make it answer anything they want really. Even when you know the principles they apply to get their answers, its still as more by luck than judgement that you would actually get the answer they want.

They are all rip off - one of my daft mates has spent 45 quid in a couple of nights trying to get through to win a poxy 2.5k...... he would have been better of buying 45 quids worth of lottery tickets I bet!