I don't know whether this riddle can be categorized as hard or tricky. Heck, I don't even know if it's even a riddle. The reason why I put this in the hardest hard riddles section is merely because this one managed to drive me crazy for some times. So, try this one and see if it will have the same effect on you:
Three friends check into a hotel for the night and the receptionist tells them that the bill is $30, payable in advance. So, they each pay him $10 and go to their room.
A few minutes later, the receptionist realizes he has made an error and overcharged the trio by $5. He asks the bellboy to return $5 to the 3 friends who had just checked in.
The bellboy sees this as an opportunity to make $2 as he reasons that the three friends would have a tough time dividing $5 evenly among them; so he decides to tell them that the clerk made a mistake of only $3, giving a dollar back to each of the friends. He pockets the leftover $2 and goes home for the day!
Now, each of the three friends gets a dollar back, thus they each paid $9 for the room which is a total of $27 for the night. We know the bellboy pocketed $2 and adding that to the $27, you get $29, not $30 which was originally spent.
Where did the other dollar go?
The facts in this riddle are clear: There is an initial $30 charge. It should have been $25, so $5 must be returned and accounted for. $3 is given to the 3 friends, $2 is kept by the bellboy - there you have the $5.
The trick to this riddle is that the addition and subtraction are done at the wrong times to misdirect your thinking - and quite successfully for most. Each of the 3 friends did indeed pay $9, not $10, and as far as the friends are concerned, they paid $27 for the night.
But we know that the receptionist will tell us that they were charged only $25 and when you add the $3 returned with the $2 kept by the bellboy, you come up with $30.
Still confuse?
The basic idea to its solution is that you should not be adding $27 + $2 to get $30! The men are in debt, they have paid $30. Then they get five back, so that they have paid $25. When the bellboy took their $2, they have spent $27, and the bellboy HAS two of those dollars.
So, it is $27 - $2 = $25, which it should be.
The hotel ends up with $25, the bellboy with $2, each man having paid $9, as they should have.
Note: Some people still won't get it after reading the answer, don't blame me though. You just need to change perception to solve this hard riddle.
Difficulty:
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