Rabbit Elephant Parrot

Why is the answer 5 ?

Let’s go through the question again and talk through the result.

1 rabbit saw 6 elephants while going to the river.  <– Therefore, one animal (the rabbit) is going towards the river.

Every elephant saw 2 monkeys going towards the river.  <– This is the tricky part, from the sentence it implies each of the 6 elephants saw 2 monkeys going towards the river, hence logically will be 6 x 2 = 12 animals (monkeys) going towards the river.

However, the statement does not explicitly say that “Every elephant saw 2 DIFFERENT monkeys…”, therefore implicit rules apply and infer that the 2 monkeys are the same.

So, the correct answer is that every elephant saw 2 monkeys, and by inference, the 2 monkeys are the same, hence there exists only 2 monkeys which are going towards the river. 

Finally, every monkey holds 1 parrot in their hands.  <– Therefore, 2 parrots are going towards the river.

So in total, 1 rabbit, 2 monkeys and 2 parrots (5 animals) are going towards the river.

Hope all of you have fun with this simple maths riddle.