When I was in elementary, my teacher said that "Lutetia" was how the Romans called the city of Liege. As an avid reader of Asterix comics, I knew this isn't true and corrected her and said it was the Roman name of Paris. She insisted that it is Liege. Anyway, the next day, she came back to class and said that she looked it up and that I was indeed correct and Lutetia referred to Paris and gave me a chocolate bar and told me to keep reading comics. Good teacher.

Why would you ask "How is this possible" when you expect the answer to be "it's not"?

The teacher is fucking stupid. The question says Marty ate more, that is not only possible it is a given.

Take that to the principal, stupid teachers shouldn't teach

If you state that Marty ate more as part of the question, you cannot answer in any other way, because it denies mathematical logic here. You introduced a lie as part of the problem, and if I need to decide myself which part of the statement is a lie, I can pick whatever I want, let's say, Marty didn't ate 4/6, but 6/6. This teacher should be taken to the gulag.

It is entirely possible and his answer was correct. Question was phrased incorrectly, if the teacher wanted an answer "it is not possible" he should have said both pizzas were the same size.

The teacher is the one who's confused here. The kid is entirely correct.

Given 4/6 x > 5/6 y therefore x > 5/4 y

Marty's Pizza must have been more than a quarter larger than Luis'. The kid is exactly right.

And the teacher is not flexible enough to engage outside their expectations for how the question was supposed to be answered.

Clearly the expectation was for the kids to take the unstated assumption that the two pizzas were of the same size, and reject the premise as unreasonable (note the heading "Reasonableness").

I... Um... I've been looking at this for a minute and I can't tell why the answer is unconventional, nor what the fuck the teacher is on about.

Teachers that don't accept an unexpected but true answer are not teaching. The test taker had a correct take, one of the pizzas could be bigger than the other. It was not specified in the question. I am so glad I am out of school

i can't fathom this being real, most probably this was made for karma farming or something.

This brings back memories of when I realized that I was smarter than most of my teachers.

This is bizarre. The info provided in the question was that Marty ate more than Luis, the question was how would that be possible given that Marty ate 4/6 of his while Luis ate 5/6 of his. The answer the kid wrote (Marty's pizza was bigger than Luis') is the only possible correct answer.

The grader is asserting that the information given in the question was wrong and that "actually it was Luis who ate more pizza"--even though it stated as a premise that "Marty ate more". How are you supposed to give a correct answer on a test if you are expected to accept one premise (proportion of pizzas eaten) while disregarding another premise (Marty ate more than Luis)? How do you decide which part to disregard? Would they have accepted the answer, "Luis actually only ate 3/6 of his pizza, not 5/6)"? Wouldn't that be just as valid an answer as "Marty actually didn't eat more than Luis"?

Some real "steel is heavier than feathers" energy coming off this teacher.

"This is not possible because..."

This kid is never going to trust teachers again.

He was right. The question is not even worded ambiguously. It was just written very poorly.

Will the teacher admit that? Or is the expectation that this (likely neuro divergent) student should have just understood the expectations based on context clues or something?

The title of this post is disappointing. The given answer is sound and it seems safe to assume it was arrived at by thinking mathematically.

I suspect many commenters are missing the point, the student's response can only be the correct and expected answer to this question. Teacher has it wrong.

So...

(4/6)m > (5/6)l
m > (5/4)l

Which means Marty's pizza is more than one and a quarter the size of Luis' pizza. We can comfortably just compare the area, since we can assume a flat disk with equal height for a pizza.

Assuming Luis' pizza is a Domino's Classic size of 25cm that's an area of:

(25cm / 2)² * π = (625cm² / 4) * π = 490.874cm²

So Marty's pizza should be more than 490.874cm² * 1.25 = 613.5925cm² for 4/6 of his to be greater than of 5/6 of Luis', so:

sqrt(613.5925cm² / π) * 2 = 13.975426964cm * 2 = 27.950853929cm

Since Marty's pizza is greater, let's go with 28cm diameter... which happens to match exactly a Domino's Medium size.

That's a very realistic scenario and the teacher is an absolute idiot for not understanding.

There's nothing wrong with the answer.

Math education in the empire is TERRIBLE. There is no actual math taught. At best it's applied analogies like this pizza BS. The teachers have never taken any advanced math so they don't even know what they're not teaching. The goals (eg. calculus) are completely worthless. The entire system is stuck in the 1700s. It's a complete failure. It's intentional too. The goal is creating obedient, little computers not critical thinkers. That would be a threat to the system. This image is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

I can't find it now and I do not think it really applies here. But someone stated that being high IQ could lead to academic problems as the high IQ learner would understand or see things that the professor could not causing the professor to mark it as incorrect.

I guess this is the idiocracy version of it.

Ah, a teacher that does not comprehend the barometer

Two other right answers:

• Luis' pizza is at least smaller than Marty's (which is basically the same answer as the kid's)
• Marty ate someone else's pizza besides his own

And, for funsies:

• Luis' pizza is 50% crust, so it doesn't fully count as pizza
• Luis doesn't like pizza and actually fed the dog while nobody was looking
• Marty is many years older than Luis, therefore he has eaten many years' worth of pizza ahead of Luis

lol this is actually a golden answer and that is why we need better teachers

Commendable for the kid to be thinking outside of the box, and a bit shitty of the teacher for not giving them maybe half a point (because it's a correct answer, but not the correct/expected answer). The test maker is also to blame - they should've taken care to eliminate all ambiguity - it's a math test after all.