Question #34. Even after knowing the answer (answer key at the bottom of the linked page), I still don’t see how you can arrive at this conclusion via logic, yet the task is to “…find the picture that follows logically from one of the six below”.
What does logic have to do with it? My answer would be based on artistic impressions, if anything. But the quiz master apparently wants us to answer this question using only our left brain. A right-leaning diagonal would satisfy my desire to see the image completed with symmetry, but that still leaves me with four choices. What is a purely logical line of thought that leads us to what the author calls the correct answer?
Consider top right and bottom left. What rule can we draw. The inner, touching triangles have reversed colors- blue/white and white blue, therefore we can assume the top left and bottom right inner, touching triangles will be mirrored - making the bottom right inner triangle pink/green. This identifies C as the answer. Is this reasonable? Check other relations- outer, not touching triangles at the top have reversed clors - yellow/red red yellow; this also applies to ‘C’ and bottom left- cream/gray gray/cream.
So the category of shapes the others belong to is “shapes that can’t be used as label pins on a sandwich stand”? That’s not a very distinctive category. There’s always a way to single out any given member of a group, but some ways are much more logical than others. If I have pictures of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzy Bear, and Ross Perot, I’m going to say that Ross is the odd man out, even though Kermit’s the only non-mammal.
Meanwhile, I’m completely flummoxed by number 35. It looks like the answer should have a filled circle in the upper-left corner, but that doesn’t help much.
Yeah, it’s a pretty bogus IQ test. The logic problems are ok, but the homily questions are just dumb.
And question 23 is simply broken and impossible, probably due to a typesetting problem. I see the sequence as 64, 16, 4, 1, <degree symbol>. Uh, what comes after degree symbol, or what comes in place of the degree symbol? In place of the degree symbol should be 1/4, which I assume they used a special character for that didn’t come out on a web page. After 1/4 would be 1/16, which is the answer they wanted, but you have to know the degree symbol is a mistake in order to get it.
Also, I think the common factor in #40 is “shapes that have never been in my kitchen.” ( for those who get the reference)
Consider that the two corner dots in the first frame are moving, and the two central dots are stationary. Follow the motion of the two dots that start out in the corners.
Yeah, that’s what I got on that. Some of us are just smarter than you, Chronos. The sooner you learn to accept it the more content you’ll be in your life as a dullard.
I like how #26 requires you to use the Pythagorean Theorem. At least they’re easy numbers to square and add together, and it just happens that the sum of the squares is a square number. If the cars had driven 7 miles after turning, the question would be much harder.
More technical problems: for #32 I only see three pictures. One of them is very obviously the correct answer, though. (Hand is to boxing glove as foot is to stupid old camera that never works right, since both are suitable means of taking out one’s frustrations on an object.) For #39, it’s very hard to see the difference between the solid and dotted lines.
Since this is part 2 of the test, it’s possible that these are supposed to be mostly relatively easy questions that people of average intelligence are supposed to get right. A few are harder than others (like #34), but none are terribly hard. Maybe the later parts would have more difficult questions.
23 is the only question I didn’t get, but I thought the little o was supposed to be a placeholder for the answer, so I don’t feel too bad about that.
The homily questions, though, didn’t require you to know those homilies. I didn’t recognize all of them myself, but in each case there was only one answer that would produce something homily-like. For instance, in number 29, you need the finger/hand combination, otherwise you end up with something pretty clunky.
then you’re a perfect candidate to explain #39 to me (the only one I don’t understand. I missed another one, but it was because I wasn’t paying very close attention).
Restating the question as “w is to x as y is to ___”, it seems like x is either a cross-section or an edge-on view of w. But both are flawed in one way or another. If it’s a cross-section, it should have dark dots at the ends (but maybe I just can’t see them on my monitor), and if it’s an edge-on view, it should be a dark line, not a light one (but maybe it really is the right color and I’m being fooled by an optical illusion). I decided that I’d go with the unlikely “x is a cross-section of w with the ends chopped off” and picked answer A.
I just figured that I was looking for the second figure’s vertical border. The problem with the shades of grey and the dots is covered by the idea that the shades are reversed. So
(light square with dark border) is to (light vertical border) as
(light square with light-dark-light-etc border) is to (dark-light-dark-etc, vertical border)
But I didn’t analyze it to that degree the first time. When I figured that I needed a dotted vertical line, there was only one choice, so I didn’t bother looking at the light-dark part of it.
I was just assigning names w, x, and y to the pictures to make it easier to talk about them.
Ok, but you seem to be ignoring the fact that the “solid vertical line” is light gray (the color of the square’s interior, not its border). That’s what is throwing me off. In that case, shouldn’t the dotted line be light gray as well?
Manduck’s explanation allowing the shades to be reversed makes the whole thing make sense (especially since, if you look really close, the top pixel of the side on the dotted-border rectangle is light gray, but the top pixel on the dotted vertical line is dark gray :)). But that does seem to be a rather obscure twist.
Part of my thought process for taking these tests is to come up with a hypothesis, then double-check it for consistency by making sure there’s no evidence that could make it wrong. The shades of gray in this one seemed to introduce an inconsistency.
I haven’t read the thread yet, but I chose C because the upper-left has red and yellow in it, and the upper-right has the same colours reversed. The lower-left figure indicates that yellow = grey and red = tan, with the colours rotated 180°. Given that, I looked for a figure that looked like the one in the upper-left, rotated 180°, and with grey on the inside and tan on the outside. This is C. (Just checked my answer, and I was correct.)
for those who get the reference)