Only 1 in 7 Get This Right: How Many Holes Are in This Shirt?

At first glance, this looks like one of those questions you can answer in about two seconds.

A shirt has a neck opening, two sleeves, and a bottom opening. Easy, right?

But then you notice the two large tears in the front of the shirt.

Suddenly, that simple question becomes a surprisingly tricky little brain teaser!

So, how many holes are actually in this shirt?

Take another look at the picture before you answer. Don’t rush it—because the wording of the puzzle is doing a lot of the work here.

Look Closely Before You Answer

The shirt in the image has the usual openings you’d expect to find on a short-sleeved shirt:

One opening at the neck

One opening at the left sleeve

One opening at the right sleeve

One large opening at the bottom

That gives us 4 obvious openings.

But there are also 2 visible tears in the body of the shirt.

So if we’re simply counting the openings and holes we can see in the picture:

4 + 2 = 6

That makes 6 holes the straightforward answer.

But the visible tears may not be the only detail that changes the answer—there’s another way to look at the shirt that makes this puzzle much more interesting.

The Trick Behind the Shirt Hole Puzzle

This is where the classic shirt-hole puzzle gets sneaky.