GCSE maths question leaves people on Reddit scratching their heads

A GCSE maths question about a boy catching rabbits in the woods has left people puzzled. But would you be able to answer it?

It's exam season, and students up and down the country are knuckling down and revising. It's a stressful time for teenagers, with the first exams having started on Monday May 6 and most of them not wrapping up until on or before Friday June 21.

One person took to Reddit to highlight what many mistook for a 'trick question' in a Maths past paper. Posting a screenshot of the question to the r/GCSE subreddit, the user wrote: "Right who's making these questions".

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The head-scratcher comes from a 2022 Pearson Edexcel GCSE higher maths paper. It sets out the problem: "Albie is studying the population of rabbits in a wood. One day, he catches 55 rabbits and finds that 40 of these rabbits are marked with a tag.

"Albie estimates there are 50 rabbits in the wood. Explain why Albie’s estimate cannot be correct".

The question seemed so simple that it left people confused. One person explained: "He caught 55 rabbits, so the estimate of the total number of rabbits in the wood cannot possibly be lower than 55, therefore the estimate is incorrect. I guess I'd write something like this." They added: "These type of questions do make you question your own intelligence, the answer is so obvious that it feels wrong at first".

But it was the technicalities of the question that also left Redditors perplexed. One person asked: "I’m confused. Is the answer just that he caught 55 rabbits, so there has to be at least 55 in the woods?" as another reasoned: "But if he caught the rabbits those rabbits are no longer in the woods meaning he could be correct".

Someone else added: "Assuming he's operating catch and release. If it's catch and bag, then he has just removed 55 rabbits from the wood." Another person admitted: "It seriously threw me off until I read the comments. I thought the expectation is that by recording the tags he was able to confirm whether a rabbit he has caught is one he had previously caught and that he had then worked out it was approximately a 10% chance of catching the same rabbit. 10% off of 55 is roughly 50 so he estimated that there are 50 rabbits."

They added: "The only issue is there's no information given about that and it turns out the whole f****** question is a red herring and the real question literally just boils down to what's bigger, 55 or 50."

According to Maths Genie, the correct answer is indeed that Albie can't be correct because he caught 55 rabbits, and 55 is larger than his estimate of 50.

Would you have got the answer right?