[For Seniors] Tricky quiz with annoying answers: a collection of questions guaranteed to get everyone excited once they hear the answers

0 years old

At first glance, this question makes you think about the legal driving age, but in fact it only asks about the act of “riding in a car.” If you’re just a passenger, there’s no age restriction, so even a newborn—i.e., a 0-year-old—can ride in a car using a child seat. It’s an annoying trick question that focuses on “riding,” not “driving.”

0 yen

Normally, you might subtract 300 yen from 500 yen and think the answer is 200 yen, but the problem implicitly suggests that the payment was made so that no change would be needed. In this case, B-chan paid exactly 300 yen to avoid receiving any change. In other words, the change is 0 yen. For problems like this, you need to not only calculate straightforwardly but also read the intent of the question and any hidden conditions carefully. It’s a bit of a trick question.

Hard to read.

Even if you turn a newspaper upside down, its content doesn’t change, but the letters are reversed, making it very hard to read. This isn’t the common “shinbunshi” palindrome that reads the same backward and forward!

two

In the problem statement, the word “ato” in the question “Ato wa ikutsu deshou ka?” means the “marks (impressions) left behind” after pulling out the radishes. In other words, if you pull out two radishes, you end up with two marks. In a normal arithmetic problem, it would be interpreted as “How many are left?”, but this is a wordplay trick question, and the answer is that there are two marks left.

Very easy

You’ll naturally want to answer 100 + 200 = 300, but this quiz is a trick question, and the problem statement explicitly says “the answer is very simple.” In other words, the answer is literally “very simple”—an annoying question indeed.

2 people

In hide-and-seek, there is one “it” (the seeker) and the rest are hiders. If you play hide-and-seek with eight people, there will be one seeker and seven hiders. If five people have been found, that means five of the hiders have been found, so there are still two hiders who haven’t been found. Therefore, the answer is two.

Mr./Ms. A is a foreigner and did not understand Japanese, so ...

This question isn’t about knowledge or calculation; the trick lies in the way it’s posed. Person A is an adult, but because they are a foreigner who doesn’t understand Japanese, they didn’t understand the Japanese question “What is 1 + 1?” to begin with. That’s why they couldn’t answer.