This trick question says a woman has three cups of coffee and drinks two. How many cups does she have afterward?
The answer is still 3 cups.
She may have drunk the coffee from two of them, but the cups themselves have not disappeared. She still possesses all three cups; two are simply empty or partly empty.
The trick is the difference between the drink and the container. Many people immediately subtract 2 from 3 and answer 1, treating the cups as if they vanished when the coffee was consumed.
But the question asks how many cups she has, not how many cups still contain coffee. Since drinking the coffee does not remove the cups, she still has all three.
