Kids math question asking what time is closest to midnight leaves people totally puzzled
You might think that you're well past the point of struggling with questions posed to children in school, yet one perhaps deceptively simple problem has left many on social media feeling totally puzzled.
Absence can often breed complacency years after you've left school, and we certainly don't blame you for forgetting all of the complex problems you might have learned in math class or the inner workings of the body that you studied intently in science.
Sometimes all it takes it a bit of a brain fart to make a fool of yourself though, and that's what plenty have seemingly experienced after being faced with an otherwise simple test question meant for children.
As shared by LADbible, the question was originally shared by @yawdmontweet on X, posing the quiz section that had originally been meant to test presumably young children to an audience of adults on social media.
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The question itself asked everyone to figure out what the closest time to midnight is out of the four options, which were as follows:
- A — 11:55 a.m.
- B — 12:06 a.m.
- C — 11:50 a.m.
- D — 12:03 a.m.
While some might struggle with a 24-hour clock system, it shouldn't be too difficult to have the knowledge that midnight is 00:00 or 12:00 a.m. depending of what type of time you use, yet many were seemingly left dumbstruck when searching for the answer here.
Hopefully you're not one of the people struggling, but in case you were wondering the answer is, of course, D, as that is just three minutes past the point of midnight.
Some might have gone for A instead, as that's the second 'closest' to 12 o'clock, but this is actually 11 hours and 55 minutes away from midnight and the furthest away out of all four answers.
Part of the issue for some appears to have been a difficulty in parsing the notion of 'closest to', as they perceived this to be a question of chronology where other answers might seem 'correct' as they come before the clock strikes midnight.
"Clearly a lot of children have been left behind," writes one disgruntled user in the replies. "The answer is D!!! 'To' just means closest to the time itself, not insinuating that it's necessarily before midnight."
Unsurprisingly some even had to turn to ChatGPT and other AI tools in search of the answer, which perhaps says more that most would like to admit, but at least there were no hallucinations present here as that too presented the correct answer of D.