From this article from the Villiage Voice, there is an example of a question from “World’s Most Difficult IQ Test”, published in Omni in 1985.
The question is: “Pain is to Rue, as Bread is to ?”
Has anybody got an idea what the answer might be?
Pain is French for “bread”, so I’m going to say that the blank is “street”, since that’s what “rue” means.
Street?
Notice how this completely contradicts the whole idea of an IQ test, since it depends on specific knowledge that has nothing at all to do with intelligence. I don’t believe that true IQ tests are possible, but this is a particularly egregious example.
Street, and what Hari said.
Pain is hurt, to rue is to regret. When you have pain you rue the thing that brought it about.
When you have bread, you knead the thing that brought it about (dough). So I say “knead.”
I was going to put a smiley here but this could in all seriousness be a valid answer to this whacked-out question which won’t tell you anything about anyone’s IQ.
I was thinking along the lines that one would naturally rue something painful, just as you would usually eat bread. This version keeps things in English.
That’s ruling out Celiac disease; then you would rue bread also :).
Does that make sense at all?
I was thinking along these same lines also, and then I stopped and thought “I could come up with about 3,000 correct answers when viewed from different perspectives”
I’ve never liked these types of pattern questions that could have multiple answers.
also dismayed by the ridiculous nature of the analogy and the notion that it has anything to do with IQ (if such a thing as IQ is even a valid indicator of… anything)
How about Pain is to Rue as Bread is to What the Hell?
As I recall, this was a multiple-choice test. Without the choice options, it’s impossible to judge the question.
But you rue after the pain, but knead before the bread, so I don’t think that’s a good match.
The other flaw is the very idea of the “World’s Most Difficult IQ Test.” I’m no Mensa member, but it seems to me that if an IQ test is supposed to measure one’s intelligence on the 100=normal scale, it needs to be administered to people of all levels of intelligence.
Yep-- me, too. I never considered the French version since an IQ test that depends on your knowledge of a foreign language would be absurd. It would be a test of knowledge, not intelligence.
Bonjour, mes amis. 
Le mot, je pense, est “Street”.
Mais la question est merde!
As others have posted, there’s often more than one answer to IQ tests.
Here’s my effort:
If ‘Pain’ is to ‘Rue’, then we advance the first letter by one alphabet step, keep the other consonant / vowel relationships (a>u, i>e), but drop the 4th letter.
So ‘Bread’ is to ‘Crap’.
Thank you.
I thought rue is a type of cooking sauce involving flour.
On the off chance I’m not being whooshed, that’s a “roux”.
I remember these tests in Omni magazine. When I was a kid I had an obsession with I.Q. I think I even sent this one in to be scored. I did well, but I now think that such tests are a load of crap for many of the reasons stated above.
While I agree with all the criticisms posted above regarding this type of question, it is in line with the types of questions on a traditional IQ test that test “general” intelligence. The argument being, that if you are an intelligent person you are you are going to be more curious about the world and notice things about the world and therefore know more about the world in general, than the average person. Hence, according to this theory, a person who speaks only english, but is especially aware of linguistic patterns, etc, would encounter the French world “pain” and know it means bread. The same type of reasoning applies to such questions as: “How many miles is it from New York to Paris”. It’s not that anyone expects you to give them the exact figure, but you could arrive at a ballpark figure using the facts you already know about the world.
That being said, there is an obvious flaw here. Age would tend to increase this type of “intelligence”, and IQ tests are supposed to be age-neutral after you reach mental maturity. In my case, I know without a doubt, that when I was in college, although having reached full “mental maturity”, I would NOT have made the connection between “pain” and “bread”. I simply hadn’t encountered the french word “pain” enough in my daily life and I’d never been to France.
However today, when I saw the posted question, and before I looked at any of the replies, I knew that “pain” meant bread and made the connection to the word “street” as the answer. The reason I immediately made the connection between bread and “pain” is mostly because of that store “la bon pain”. (don’t laugh!) I didn’t get more intelligent, I simply got more experienced. Maybe experience = intelligence, but then older people would regularly get higher scores than younger ones.
Oops… I meant the store “Au Bon Pain”. :smack: Hey, I still don’t speak French!
- A person from eastern Ontario, western Quebec, or Montréal would consider the previous question to be:
a. Gauche
b. Bourgeois
c. Un cheeseburger avec bacon
(for the record, I got it pretty quickly)