The answer is four.
I can quite confidently say that based on the wording given, the answer is four.
First of all, we need to establish some things. I am assuming:
- All five people were alive before entering
- The four people that were killed are the only people that have died
I can figure this out because of the last word: “remains.”
“Remains” can be one of two things: a noun or a verb.
As a verb, there are multiple answers to the question. First, if there are five people and four are killed, one person is left alive. However, you are in there as well, so would that be two remaining? Or should we count everyone in the room, which would be six people?
Well, none of this matters. This is because the question states “How many remains?” As a verb, “remains” applies to only a few certain subjects: he/she/one (he remains/she remains/one remains). Otherwise it would be I remain/You remain/They remain/We remain.
If “remain” was to be used as a verb, it would’ve said “How many remain?” rather than “How many remains?”So we can say that either:
- There is a grammatical mistake (the question meant to say “How many remain?”
- “Remains” is meant to be used as a noun.
As a noun, “remains” refers to the dead bodies. The question states that four people were killed. Therefore, there are four remains.
However, it is entirely possible that this was just a grammatical mistake. As the question contains another grammatical error (“There are five people in a room, I came and killed 4.” has a comma splice error; the comma should be something like a semicolon or period), the “s” at the end of “remains” could have been entirely unintentional.
Despite this, I still believe that the correct answer should be four remains.
note: I’ll try my best to explain how I solved this.
thanks
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