Quizcall Weight Lifter question

[JAW67]

Being unable to sleep I came across Quizcall on Freeview last night and was completely baffled by the Weight Lifter 'add the kilo's' question. All the possible answers I had come up with had come and gone as incorrect, and when no-one got it, they finally announced the answer as 319, but didn't explain why. Did anyone see this and get the answer right? If so, can anyone explain it?!! Thanks.

[gen2]

I have not seen this particular freeview channel but it siunds similar to channels on Sky.  There they give around five statements / sentences and then use the words 'Add up the numbers'.  It is a trick because they don't just add up the obvious numbers, but include numbers written out in words such as the TEN in 'tennis player'.  If a number is seen as 123 then it doesn't just count as 123, but also its constituent parts like 1 + 2 + 3 + 12 + 23 + 123.  Roman numerals (letters) that appear in the statements are also counted so in my example of 'tennIs pLayer' you would add another 1 for the i and 50 for the L.  Sometimes the statements can have a dash in them that can be interpreted as a minus sign.

WARNING:  They are not consistent in the way they interpret their own problems so there is no chance of winning, however sure you are of the answer.  It is a big con to get the revenue from the phone calls.  There is a lot of discussion on this elsewhere on the internet.

See also my answer to a similar question posted here.  

[barry1999]

I thought I had it worked out when they first asked the question last year, I correctly predicted the answer a couple of times, but they seem to have changed the rules since then because people were ringing in with the right answer and hence they were losing money.

If you look on the Phone Quiz Answers Resource website,
http://www.phonequiz.somee.com they've got a database going back 6 months with answers to the questions for all the various quizshows, so you can go back and check what answers Quizcall have been saying are right and wrong.