Oxford, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, shared a math question on its official Twitter account and said, ‘Can you solve this question?’ he asked. When the question shared as E was by Oxford, hundreds and even thousands of people tried to solve it.
We shared this question asked by Oxford on our Twitter account. Let’s see what is this question that people can’t agree on the answer to.
How many inches long is a piece of paper?
In the Cambridge assessment question shared by Oxford, he asks:
Two equal rectangular pieces of paper are joined end to end, overlapping 5 cm. One of the rectangles is folded (not to scale) to form the structure below. What is the length of a piece of paper if the total length of the whole structure is 75 cm?
Have you started solving?
Did you find the answer?
Did you find 44.5?
Then you got it wrong, let’s move on to the solution
Actually, the solution to the problem is quite simple. In fact, the question itself is a pretty simple high school geometry question. The first thing we need to grasp for the solution is that in the question we are given two sheets of paper on top of each other and this overlapping part is 5 cm long.
When we add this 5 cm to our total length, we get 80 cm. Let’s keep this in our pocket for now. In the question, we are also given that the paper on the right is folded and that the folded part is 3 cm long. When we straighten them, our total length becomes 6 cm longer. So in the end we find that the total length of the two flattened and butt-jointed pieces of paper is 86 cm.
All we have left to do is divide 86 by 2: The answer is 43!
When we divide the total length by two, we find that the length of a piece of paper is 43 centimeters. Under our Twitter post, the most preferred answer among our followers was 44.5, how many did you find?
10761
