A Couple and Their Extended Family: A Counting Puzzle
Often, puzzles and riddles challenge our cognitive skills, especially those that involve logic and number-crunching. One such riddle is the question, 'A couple goes to a restaurant they have two children and each child has four cousins. How many people go to the restaurant?' This riddle, at first glance, can be tricky to solve, but with a careful look, the answer becomes clear.
Breaking Down the Puzzle
The key to solving any riddle is to break it down into manageable parts. Let's start with the given information:
A couple goes to the restaurant. Each of the couple's two children has four cousins.When we look at the first piece of information, it is clearly mentioned that a couple goes to the restaurant. So, we start with two people: the couple.
The Couple's Children
Next, we need to consider the couple's two children. This adds two more people to our count. So, we now have four people in total (2 2).
The Cousins
Now, we get to the tricky part: the cousins. Here’s where the riddle becomes a bit more complicated. The riddle states that 'each child has four cousins.' This implies that the four cousins are not shared between the two children, but are each child's own set of four cousins. Therefore, each child's four cousins are separate and do not overlap with the other child's four cousins.
To break it down further, each child's four cousins are unique, meaning there are no common cousins between the two siblings. Thus, we have 4 cousins for the first child and another 4 cousins for the second child, totaling 8 cousins in all. These cousins are distinct individuals and do not count as shared siblings.
Conclusion
Adding all these individuals together, we get the following count:
2 people - the couple 2 people - the couple's children 8 people - the cousins (4 for each child, no overlap)Therefore, the total number of people who go to the restaurant is 12.
Mathematical Puzzles and Logical Thinking
Solving puzzles like this one not only sharpens our logical thinking but also helps us to understand how to extract all the relevant information from a given problem. It’s important to read all the details carefully and to avoid making unwarranted assumptions.
Conclusion
The answer to the riddle is that 12 people go to the restaurant. We hope this explanation clarifies the logic behind the puzzle and offers a fun challenge for anyone interested in mathematical and logical puzzles.