ANSWER:
5 Animals.
If you got the correct answer, well done!!
Why is the answer 5?
Let’s go through the question again.
1 rabbit saw 6 elephants while going to the river. <– Hence, 1 animal (rabbit) is going towards the river.
Every elephant saw 2 monkeys going towards the river. <– This is the tricky part, from the sentence it seems to imply each of the 6 elephants saw 2 monkeys going towards the river, hence logically will be 6 x 2 = 12 animals (monkeys) going towards the river.
However, the statement does not explicitly mention that “Every elephant saw 2 DIFFERENT monkeys…”, hence implicit rules apply and infer that the 2 monkeys are the same.
Hence, correct answer is that every elephant saw 2 monkeys, and by inference, the 2 monkeys are the same, hence there exists only 2 monkeys which are going towards the river !! ?
Finally, every monkey holds 1 parrot in their hands. <– Hence, 2 parrots are going towards the river.
So in total, 1 rabbit, 2 monkeys and 2 parrots (5 animals) are going towards the river.
