Thread: Brain Teaser

Three men go to a hotel and the clerk charges them $30 for their room. So the three men each pay $10 each.

Later, the clerk discovers he charged the men $5 too much so he sends a bellhop to their room to return the $5 to the men. Knowing that there are 3 men, the bellhop quickly figures that the $5 will not be split evenly between the men so he decides to only return $3 to the men and keep the other $2 for himself. So he returns the $3 to the men whose share of the room is now only $9 each.

Question: If each of the 3 men paid $9 each that equals $27, and the bellhop kept $2 for himself, what happened to the other $1 of the original $30?

This is a clever brain teaser. $30.00 is the elusive number that everyone wants to focus on. However, you have to dismiss comon logic and solve this delima mathmatically.

The number to get to is $25.00.

when 5$ was refunded it made the total paid by each man was 8.33

multiply that by 3 equals 25

If they gave the bell boy $2 and then gave each other $1 we can mathematically conclude that each man actually paid $9.33 not $9.