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Difficulty: Fun

How well do you know your dice? A standard dice is a cube with six sides. Each side is numbered with a different number from 1–6.

Most six-sided dice also have a special trick in the way they are numbered. If you add the number on the top and the number on the bottom, you’ll get a ‘magic’ total. It doesn’t matter if you roll a 2 or a 6 or any other number, when you add the top number and the number underneath the dice, you’ll get the same total!

Can you work out what that magic total is?
 
Scroll down or click for a hint, or the answer!

Brainteaser hint

The top and bottom of a cube make a pair of sides. There are three pairs of sides on a cube – top and bottom, front and back, and left and right. You’ll need to make three pairs of numbers to go with the three pairs of sides.

Brainteaser answer

Imagine if the top side is a 6, the highest possible number. What’s on the bottom? A good guess would be the lowest number, 1. So the magic total is 6 + 1 = 7.

To check if this works with the other sides, arrange the other numbers in pairs that add up to 7 too:
5 + 2 = 7 and 4 + 3 = 7.

We’ve now used every number from 1 to 6 exactly once, and every pair adds to 7!

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