Odds on

There has never been any doubt that academically my talents rest more with the arts than the sciences.  This, I suspect, was highlighted by this post where I pretty much failed to understand gravity.

Confession time: despite working in banking for the best part of the last ten years, I am also truly terrible at maths.  (For the Americans, that's "maths" plural because schools over here generally make you do more than one sum before letting you off, as "math" might suggest.)

Oh, don't get me wrong, I successfully limped through the National Curriculum and gained an adequate "B" at GCSE (my lowest GCSE grade and my highest GCSE achievement), but I was never going to enjoy a job where I had to do anything more complex than work out the occasional percentage.

Which brings me to my Question Of The Month.

• If you add two even numbers together, you get an even number (e.g. 4+4=8, 16+2=18 etc.)
• If you add two odd numbers together, you get an even number (e.g. 3+3=6, 19+5=24 etc.)
• If you add an odd and an even number together, you get an odd number (e.g. 5+2=7, 9+6=15 etc.)

Out of these three possible combinations, two of them result in the output of an even number.

Shouldn't this mean there are twice as many even numbers as there are odd?

I asked TheBloke (TM) about this, and he just looked at me, raised a ginger eyebrow and said, "You're an idiot."

I am beginning to think this is what he says when he doesn't know the answer to something.