This egg riddle sounds like a subtraction problem, but the wording contains the answer. You start with 12 eggs and are told that “all but 5” get broken.
The phrase “all but 5” means every egg except five. Therefore, five eggs remain unbroken. There is no need to subtract five from twelve to answer the question.
Answer: 5 eggs are not broken.
These wording puzzles are tricky because numbers encourage us to start calculating immediately. Reading the sentence literally is the fastest route to the correct answer.
