Five questions to make you think.

In the Thirties, two self-styled intelligence experts set out to discover clever people by publishing a book posing devilishly difficult brain-teasers for members of the general public.

As a break from the constant inundation of tests and researches I blog about daily, let's test our intelligence with a couple of their posers.

The following five questions are extracts from Are You Really A Genius? Timely Tests For The Irritatingly Intelligent, by Robert A. Streeter and Robert G. Hoehn. Source: Daily Mail.

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1. Rearrange the following letters so as to make the name of a living creature:

B R I N O

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2. Four men can build four boats in four days. How long will it take one man to build one boat?

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3. Test your memory on this passage: Three men and their wives and a widower left by car at noon one day for a picnic. After they had gone three miles, they saw two men and a child in another car that had broken down. ‘That is tough luck,’ said one of the picnickers. At 1 pm they arrived at the picnic grounds, where they saw only the old one-armed caretaker and his son. They immediately started to eat their luncheon of sandwiches, fruit and cake. Question: How many people have been mentioned?

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4. Which is heavier, milk or cream?

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5. What one word means both ‘dodge’ and ‘immerse’?

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How did you do?

See the answers below.

If you really want to test yourself with 24 questions, to to the Daily Mail article. 

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Milk was originally distributed in 'pails'. The earliest methods of cream separation made use of gravity. In one method, milk was poured into shallow pans (2 to 4 inches deep) known as setting pans. The pans were placed in a cold, clean room for 36 hours allowing the cream to rise to the top. At that point, it was skimmed by hand with a tool called a cream skimmer. This method made it difficult to handle large amounts of milk. As much as 30 percent of the cream was left behind.

As a child of 10 (in 1952), I went on an excursion to a farm, arranged for city children by my Australian school. There, I remember the good woman who hosted about three of us using this method. The cream was thick and sticky. We watched her turn some into butter. That's real food. None of the modern margarine for the olden-days farmers.
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Answers:

1 – Robin. 2 – Four. 3 – 12. 4 – Milk (because cream comes to the surface. 5 – Duck.

With our limited attention span these days and our lack of time to sit and ponder, it's not easy to concentrate. You're forgiven if you didn't get more than one right.

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