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Five questions to make you think.

4/6/2015

11 Comments

 
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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.



11 Comments
ashley picco link
4/5/2015 09:08:07 pm

it took me a while to get them....but I don't understand the answer to number 2? "flour" isn't an amount of time

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Francene Stanley
4/6/2015 03:38:12 am

Sorry, guys and gals. I made a typo by adding an extra letter to four. Fixed now.

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Nick #thisyearinmusic link
4/5/2015 09:08:45 pm

Far too taxing for my first tea of the day...

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Lata Subramanian link
4/5/2015 10:07:38 pm

I always fail such tests:)

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Scott link
4/5/2015 11:40:23 pm

Four out of five, I'll take it. By the way, your answer to #2 is four, not flour.

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Alana link
4/6/2015 12:06:13 am

I got two of them right (four, not flour). I stink at any kind of word scrambles or anything that involves math!

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Ajay Pai link
4/6/2015 03:57:25 am

I had a weird one for the first question

1. I read the same as RHINO.(because u said its creature).

only the 4th one was correct. :(

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Anamika Agnihotri link
4/6/2015 04:26:33 am

Francene that was a fun exercise. I got correct answers for the first three questions. :-) I thought the last question was about english vocabulary in which I am not too strong and the 4th pertained to science.

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Shonda link
4/6/2015 06:03:01 am

What a fun exercise. It brings back Finite Math and doing word scrambles daily as a child like a roaring tornado. 4 of 5 correct. Need to brush up my skills.

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Diane link
4/6/2015 07:29:27 am

Wow--had to work the brain on those but I did get them all correct! Thanks for a bit of fun today!

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Ina Tales
4/6/2015 05:52:37 pm

Ok I am not hyperventilating. But can you write a post on what ppl should do what they find out that they lack gray material? I need this answer pronto :D

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    Francene Stanley
    From England, I use news items in my novels which you can see below, all linked to an Amazon near you.

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