Well look, all math problems have a numerical answer. I've been doing them for 8 years so far and every time they've had an answer. These problems are also very

Well look, all math problems have a numerical answer. I've been doing them for 8 years so far and every time they've had an answer. These problems are also very silly. But I can confidently state that every math problem has some words and numbers and you are expected to perform some kind of calculation with the numbers based on the words around them. The problem I see right now doesn't have an immediate connection between the statement and the question parts. I have the numbers 125 and 5 and the question "how old is the shepherd?". I can see that the answer must be a person's age. The numbers refer to how many sheep and how many dogs are in the flock, which isn't really related to the shepherd's age. Still, there's probably some lateral thinking involved, or there's an omission, because I must obviously answer with a number. If I add, subtract or multiply the two numbers in any order, I do not get a number that is plausible as a person's age. However, if I divide them, I get 25, which is totally a possible answer. 25 is also the number of sheep per dog. Assuming that that's a normal ratio for a flock, we can say that the shepherd's flock contains 5 flock-units. So if the shepherd started at 17 years old (very plausible in a rural setting) and was given a new flock-unit every two years (obviously as you get older you get to take on more responsibility), at age 25 the amount of responsibility would have grown to 5 flock-units. This answer has a nice symmetry to it. Math answers have some sort of nice symmetry in them, so this sounds plausible. With the information given I can do no better. Answer: 25 years old.