(The topic title is a metaphor - i.e. a lie) This post contains a spoiler for anyone intending to do the washingtonpost.com IQ tickletest for March 20th * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * Doing this test (having nothing better to do - or at least nothing I wanted to get started on after a full day working on getting our theatre premises electrical system up to the standard needed to renew our licence) when I finished and checked the answers, I came across the following, which struck me as a distinctly round-the-houses way of getting the solution: The question was: [quote:5f0424a593]21. Ten people can paint 60 houses in 120 days, so five people can paint 30 houses in: A 15 days B 30 days C 60 days D 120 days [/quote:5f0424a593] and the explanation they gave for the solution was: [quote:5f0424a593] To solve this problem, try simplifying. If the ten people who had the task of painting 60 houses in 120 days decided that they all wanted to work alone, one person painting one house at a time, how many houses would just one person need to paint to have all 60 houses painted by the deadline in 120 days? To figure this out, you would divide 10 people into 60 houses to get 6 houses each. One person would need to paint 6 houses in 120 days to complete the goal. You can check your work by multiplying it back out - if each of 10 people painted 6 houses each in 120 days, how many houses would be painted at the end of the period? 10 multiplied by 6 is 60. Now, how long would it take for 5 people to paint 30 houses? Well, if they decided to divide the work amongst themselves and work alone, each of five people would paint 6 houses. So, the question becomes, how long would it take for one person to paint 6 houses? We already know that it takes one person 120 days to paint 6 houses, so the correct answer is that 5 people can paint 30 houses in 120 days, or answer option "D". [/quote:5f0424a593] Now, maybe I just think too simply, but I just looked at the question and thought "Ten people painting sixty houses is just two groups of five people painting thirty houses each group - answer - a hundred and twenty days". In any event, I'm very dubious about the people running this test - they do not even seem to know the definition of a percentile - and the test is very linguisticly oriented - including recognisiing quotations in English - and no-one can give any sort of meaningful result on forty questions. Still, it's a bit of fun at the end of a long day - I see they have a test based on the old ink-blots (I'm not even going to [i:5f0424a593]try[/i:5f0424a593] to remember how to spell the name of the guy who started them - begins with an R) - that could be fun to try as well - maybe tomorrow! We had a discussion about the whole IQ thing on the HC board, if I remember correctly, but maybe this could spark a new thread - has anyone out there come across any sort of test of this sort with interesting oddities?
I've done that test before, but I never look at the answers. If I'm right, I know why, if I'm wrong, then their question was stupid.
