The answer is a quarter and a nickel.
Here’s the riddle: “I have two coins that add up to 30 cents — and one of them is NOT a nickel. What are the two coins?”
Work it through. The coins that could possibly be in a two-coin pair worth 30¢ or less are a penny (1¢), a nickel (5¢), a dime (10¢), and a quarter (25¢) — a half-dollar is already too big on its own. Now find every pair that sums to exactly 30: 25 + 5 is the only one. (25 + 1 = 26, 10 + 10 = 20, 10 + 5 = 15 — nothing else reaches 30.) So the coins MUST be a quarter and a nickel. There’s no other possibility.
So where’s the trick? In your reading, not in the coins. The riddle says “one of them is not a nickel.” It never says neither of them is. The quarter is the one that is not a nickel — and the other one is. The statement is completely true, and it still fooled almost everybody, because our brains hear “one is not a nickel” and quietly upgrade it to “no nickels allowed.”
Did it get you? Drop your first (wrong) answer in the comments — dimes get confessed the most — and try tomorrow’s riddle on our page.
