QUESTION: Mike plays ping pong for 40 minutes. In the ﬁrst 20 minutes, he scores 4
points. In the second 20 minutes, he scores 25% more points. How many total points did he
score?
EQUATION ONLY (WRONG ANSWER): (4 + 20 * 0.25) = 6. The answer is 6.
CHAIN OF THOUGHT (CORRECT): Mike played ping pong for 40 minutes. In the ﬁrst
20 minutes, he scored 4 points. In the second 20 minutes, he scored 25% more points. So
he scored 25% more in the second 20 minutes. 4 x 1.25 = 5. So he scored 5 points in the
second 20 minutes. So he scored 9 points in total. The answer is 9.

It is hard for the model to directly translate all of the semantics into a single equation, but chain of
thought allows it to better reason about each part of the question via intermediate steps in natural
language.

19

B All Experimental Results
Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models