This maths brainteaser might just make you cry.

Math is one of the most divisive subjects we learn at school. Some people excel at it, while other students really struggle to understand topics like algebra and geometry. However, it can have some important real-world applications – such as working out a percentage discount when you do your shopping or knowing how to slice something into equal parts.

Practising different maths puzzles can also help to boost your cognitive function and improve your problem-solving skills. They can even help keep diseases like dementia at bay as they strengthen the connections between your brain cells.

If you’re looking for a way to test your maths skills, then this tricky exam question could be the perfect way to do it. But be warned, because the brainteaser did leave one woman so frustrated she burst into tears because she couldn’t solve it.

A video shared on TikTok by The Math Tutor first showed a clip of an American teenager reading out a question from a maths exam. She was already in tears when the video started and declared, “I hate word problems”, as she read out the complicated question, which was posed like a riddle rather than a straightforward equation.

The question was this: “One number is 5 more than another number. Three times the greater plus twice the lesser is 30. Determine the numbers.”

The girl in the video then said the question was “messing” with her as she couldn’t work out what it was asking her to do. It definitely sounds complicated, but if you break it down, it’s quite easy to solve using some basic algebra. The rest of the TikTok video showed how to solve the question – so if you don’t want to know the answer yet, stop scrolling!

You can work this out by first breaking the written question down into some simple algebraic formulae. The first sentence in the question states that “one number”, which we will call X, is worth five plus the value of another number – which we’ll call Y. So your first equation is: x = 5 + y.

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Because we know that X is greater than Y from this first equation, we can then work out what the second sentence is asking us. It states that three lots of X plus two lots of Y is equal to 30. So 3x + 2y = 30.

Now it’s just a case of working out these two sums, which isn’t necessarily easy but can be solved with a little bit of algebra knowledge. The first thing you should do is solve the second sum, and you can start by swapping X for the value in the first sum. This means your sum should now look like this: 3(5 + y) + 2y = 30.

This equation now only has one unknown number in it, so you can work out what the value of Y would be. First solve the brackets by multiplying each number in the bracket by 3. Now your sum should read: 15 + 3y + 2y = 30. Or, to make it read more clearly, 15 + 5y = 30.

Removing the 15 from the equation means you have to subtract it from the total, which would give you 5y = 15. Then, divide 15 by 5 to give you the value of Y, which is three. Going back to the first sum to finish it off, if Y is three, then X must be eight, as X = 5 + 3.