Today, many of Britain’s news portals carried a feed about a tough GCSE mathematics question that stumped thousands of students causing a social media outcry and ended up trending on Twitter.

This is the question:
There are n sweets in a bag. Six of the sweets are orange. The rest of the sweets are yellow.
Hannah takes a sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet. Hannah then takes at random another sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet.
The probability that Hannah eats two orange sweets is 1/3. Show that n²-n-90=0

Could there be a red herring in the question, throwing students off?  I attempted to solve it:

Turns out the solution is 4 lines long.

Apparently, the reason why students are stumped is because the way the question was set had deviated from past years. It had nothing to do with the complexity of the question itself. If 16 year old students from developed countries are finding these sort of questions difficult, perhaps it is time for the country to have a hard think about the quality of their education standards.