I missed 18. The rest were ridiculously simple.
I was too lazy to actually do #10 and 11 even though I knew how. Missed the punctuation thing in #4 and didn’t understand #18.
Like others, I dislike questions like the shapes or numbers one. I ran out of time coming up with possible solutions.
For #14
Shape 1 is wider than it is tall.
Shape 2 has vertices on an angled edge connected to straight edges on both ends.
Shape 3 has one more side than the others.
Shape 4 is much narrower than the others (smallest in area, too). Probably the least remarkable, and thus the correct answer.
Shape 5 has more than one interior angle not equal to or supplementary with any of the others.
For #17, I chose 3017, as it’s the only one that is not either prime or has one of the first three primes as a factor. But I saw a good argument for 9 as a perfect square.
This.
#10 made my head asplode.
For one thing, I don’t do math. For another thing, I am an editor. They are either using type too small to read or pages too big to handle. Sorry. I DQ this question and therefore the whole test.
Did they miss a zero somewhere?
Listen, moron, if you can get 48,000 words into 21 pages, you can put a whole Stephen King novel into a 50-page pamphlet…
Okay. I’ve calmed down now. It’s just a test. **It’s just a test. **
A test I don’t have to take!
Out of curiosity How small would a font like arial or helvetica have to be to fit 48,000 words onto 21 pages with 1 inch margins and standard single line spacing all around?
Single-spaced, in 4 point type, it’s 47 pages with 1-inch margins. I can’t actually go lower than 4 pt (nor could anyone read it without a magnifying glass–I think that’s smaller than the type in my compact OED).
If I put it in Futura Lt condensed it’s 33 pages. (Still 4 pt type, but skinnier).
Too late to edit–actually, this is 6 pt type. It turns out that I can tell it to go down to 4 point, but it won’t do it, at least not in this font.
I got 'em all. But until the one about the pages to be printed in small type, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that the test was a parody!
Yes, but I believe it is reasonable that the simplest answer should be preferred as a matter of parsimony. I would submit that the given answers to #14 and #17 pass this heuristic.
Got 18 right. Didn’t get the “count the number of same words” because I glanced over it too fast. Didn’t get the “what letter goes here” for question 18 either. I didn’t time myself so I don’t know if I would have solved the printing math problem (#10) in time or not.
I think #19 is a matter of opinion. I think April is more like summer than September, which I consider fall.
But simplest is context specific. Not arguing against these particular answers, but I have encountered answers to these types of questions that I would consider arbitrary.
This isn’t a test to find really really smart people. On a test like that you want lots of hard questions, and the ones who can answer the most hard questions you know are really smart.
This is a test to find out if a football player is really dumb. On a test like that you want lots of easy questions, and the ones who can’t answer the easy questions you know are really dumb.
Ask a bunch of smart people easy questions and they’ll get them all right, and you won’t be able to tell which are smart, which are supersmart and which are ooper-doopersmart. Ask a bunch of dumb people hard questions, and they’ll get them all wrong, and so you won’t be able to tell which are dumb, which are superdumb, and which are ooper-dooperdumb.
I’m fine with math, and I’m fine with design, and I got an answer of 20 for that question (which is, to the test’s credit, given as an alternate answer.) After reading the answer, I could see what they were going for, and I’m a bit irritated that I couldn’t figure this out for myself, but a poorly posited problem.
The Wonderlic Test isn’t about football players. It had been around for thirty years before the NFL began to use it. It was developed for businesses as a way to evaluate and place workers.
If you aren’t doing it as a timed test, then the results are meaningless.
It is hilarious that they mention Ryan Fitzpatrick as having scored 50 out of 50.
I’m sorry, aseplace, but that literally made me laugh out loud.
mmm
Even though it was clear what the correct answer was supposed to be, Question 19 seemed odd to me. I’d have thought that a ‘typical city in the Southern Hemisphere’ doesn’t get snow in any month.
My experience, particularly my recent experience, really got in my way here. A couple of months ago I had a 90,000-word book, which for various reasons the publisher wanted in 400 pages or less. It was a challenge, and it ended up in Garamond narrow about a point and a half smaller than we usually do them. So the idea of getting a little more than half that in 21 pages was…unsettling.
I saw what they were going for, too. If they had said 2400 glophyls per potrzrebi I probably wouldn’t have had a problem (but in a timed test I wouldn’t have worked it until I’d done the rest of them, either, and I probably would have made some dumb division error anyway).