"The one who lied was Mr. Brush.

If, as he said, he had received four one dollar bills as change from the five dollar bill he handed to the cabdriver, the fare would have been $1 or less. If it had been, he would have paid with the one dollar bill, especially since he wanted to keep the five dollar bill because of the phone number he'd written on it. No matter how he paid his fare, the story he made up to explain his possession of the counterfeit bills shows he is lying."

I had several excuses why I couldn't solve it.

1. Rose was reading to me while David was turning the stereo on off while I was trying to tidy the kitchen. Could not concentrate, the story of my life.
2. We were doing this the day the news broke about Osama bin Laden. You saw my previous entry about flustered I was.
3. Rose was reading them out loud. It's much harder for me to solve a problem I hear than one I read.
4. The details in the story didn't match what I know about the world. This books is not that old. It's copyrighted 1982, but I cannot fathom a cab ride costing under a 1.00 even back then. It also made perfect sense to me that you'd give away a piece of paper that you meant to keep. So, I must have glossed over that clue.

Interestingly, I learned in my "teaching reading to adults" class that all of these are reasons people have trouble comprehending what they read--distracted, not their learning style, their knowledge of the world does not fit with the info on the page. On the other hand, weak readers assume there is something wrong with them when they can't understand something. I, as a traditionally strong reader and thinker, figure there's something wrong with the thing I'm reading--they wrote it wrong; I didn't read it wrong.