Students often struggle to connect math with the real world. Word problems—a combination of words, numbers, and mathematical operations—can be a perfect vehicle to take abstract numbers off the page.

After years of assigning the kind of homework she had done as a student and observing students’ disengagement with it, a teacher overhauled how she assigns math practice.

If you are interested in learning about the easiest math problems that look hard, then you have come to the right place. Many people consider mathematics to be tough, and if you are one of them, then ...