Grey elephants in Denmark

No, an invading force of plain pachyderms is not trumpeting through the streets of Denmark; this is the answer to a listening skills exercise from our seminar this morning.

Once per quarter all of our division gets together for a meeting. Every so often, as the budget allows, a speaker of some sort is brought in. Today's topic was Teambuilding Through Humor...and the speaker was also a professional magician and clinical hypnotist. He was extremely entertaining, personable and knowledgable, but I'm left with the same question I have after all of these presentations: will anyone actually use what they learned?

The post title?

Pick a number between one and ten.
Multiply that number by nine.
Take the result and add the digits together.
Subtract five from the result.
Assign a letter to your number - A = 1, B= 2, C =3, D = 4 etc.

Now, think of a country beginning with that letter.
Next, take the next letter of the alphabet after your first letter and think of an animal.
Finally, advance two letters of the alphabet after that and think of a color.

You should be left with a grey elephant in Denmark. Seriously. The key here is that no matter what number you initially chose, when you multiply by nine, the digits of the resulting number will always add up to nine. Therefore, the final number is always four.

There are only so many countries/animals/colors beginning with D, E and G, respecively.

The most amusing bit of this exercise? In a room full of numbers people, only about half did the math correctly.