A British mom who was left scratching her head at a question from her first-grade daughter’s homework turned to the internet to find the answer, completely unaware that the trick question would go viral.
Forty-year-old mom of three Laura Rathbone of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, southeast England, said her daughter, Lilly-Mo, came home one day with a new assignment, excited to take on a challenge.
“She really loves challenges and homework, and she thrives on doing really well,” Ms. Rathbone said. Whenever her homework book comes home from school, she’s ready to see what the questions are.”
This time the question she received was: “Which word is the odd one out?” With the options: friend, desk, toothbrush, egg, silver.
Lilly-Mo turned to her mother and said, “Silver,” with the reasoning that it was a color.
However, Ms. Rathbone thought there was more than one possible answer to the trick question. Curious to find out the right answer, she took a picture of the question and shared it with a Whatsapp group for mothers of first graders.
“I went in the group, and I asked all the moms, and I said, ‘Look, I’ve got this question. What what do you think?’” she said. “They all gave different answers.”
“It just blew up,” Ms. Rathbone said. “I couldn’t believe the response.”
Within a day, she received 4,000 responses from different moms and each one had their own explanation for what the right answer was.
“I really enjoyed reading everyone’s responses because everyone’s theory behind what their answer was, was different,“ she said. ”There wasn’t really a popular answer.”
The explanations varied from the number of letters in the word, to whether the word had a missing letter or not, to a food, person, and if the word could be split in two.
A lot of people were desperate to know what the teacher’s answer was. The following day, Ms. Rathbone asked Lilly-Mo’s teacher who told her the answer was “silver” since it was a color. The class had been learning about nouns that day.
“But, she did agree that it probably wasn’t the best example,” Ms. Rathbone said. “I guess for myself, I needed clarification because my brain was saying that silver can be an object as well.”
When Ms. Rathbone told her daughter that her answer was right, the bright little girl said: “Yeah, I knew it; I told you, Mom.”
