Hi Bert, I appreciate you taking your time to jump in here and answer my gripes. Kelvin, thanks for the link to the previous post on the subject (I was searching, but perhaps SE's have not yet indexed the
thread are referring to in their DB).
BTW, I did a quick and fun experiment. I gave this question to my wife, who knows nothing about programming or Java (except for knowing that she drinks it in the morning); she is a financial analyst (and a pretty good one at that). She also enjoys Sunday Puzzle on NPR with Will Shortz

. So I figured, what the heck. I spent a few minutes explaining the assignment statement and the compound operator. After that, she sat down, and with just a little help from me was able to figure out the answer in several minutes.
So... I do not mean to sound too disgruntled.

I think that the replies to my post here have put me somewhat at ease. I also recognize the following: Any real-world test is usually designed around some intended perceived level of difficulty. SCJP is not an easy test, and that's fine. There are a few "simple" questions and a few "hard" questions. Most of the questions fall around the intended mean, still pretty hard on an objective scale. I do not have problems with some questions being more difficult. But they do need to be hard questions testing a candidate's knowledge of Java... This particular one is a stretch.

It's primarily arithmetics and basic algebra made hard.
Bert, if this puzzle was meant to demonstrate the usage of drag-and-drop questions then I accept it at that. Cool. But I hope that the real hard questions on SCJP are more about testing the Java knowledge than arithmetics. So I'm just going to assume that this question was an odd outlier, and I'll shut up and go back to work. I'm feeling more relaxed now
And BTW, one questionable self-test question does not make for a bad book. This one is still the best damn self study guide that I have ever learned from!
Marcus.