What looks like a harmless children’s puzzle becomes a trap the moment you rush. The trick lies in two things we tend to overlook: how numbers are grouped when there’s no sign between them, and the strict order of operations we once memorized and then quietly forgot. Those lonely “2”s at the end of the rows are not separate soldiers; they’re secretly forming “22,” changing the entire battlefield of the equation.
Then comes the second blow: multiplication doesn’t politely wait its turn. It always goes before addition unless parentheses say otherwise. That single “2 × 0” near the end wipes out everything it touches, turning what many thought was a huge total into something far more modest. Work it through carefully and the full expression becomes 2+2+2+2+22+2+2+2+22+2×0+2, which simplifies step by step to 60. If you caught it, your inner schoolkid is still very much alive.
