This simple math quiz has been causing quite a debate on social media! It looks exactly like a multiple-choice question you would have easily solved back in grade school, but working with negative numbers is tricking a surprising number of adults today.
The image asks you to solve: “What number must be added to -11 to get 15?”
What makes this puzzle so tricky is our natural instinct to just look at the two numbers and find the difference. When reading this quickly, many people see 15 and 11 and immediately subtract them, leading them straight to the incorrect answer of 4! Others might mix up their positive and negative signs entirely and guess -26.
To get the right answer, you have to think about how negative numbers work on a number line. If you are starting all the way down at negative 11, you have to travel 11 steps just to get back up to zero. From zero, you still need to travel another 15 steps to reach your final target of 15.
To find the total distance you moved, you simply add those two parts together: 11 + 15.
Answer: d. 26
