Two offerings to test your powers of thinking.

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.

Let's test our intelligence with a couple more 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.

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1. Rearrange the letters in the word ‘sleuth’ to make another word.


2. What word meaning ‘ship’ would mean ‘small collections of water’ if the letters were read backwards?

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Sleuth is often a reference to detective work. Sleuth may also refer to animals (a group of bears or pandas) or Computing (The Sleuth Kit).

Some famous detectives:

Thomas Magnum, the suave TV detective

Dick Tracy who started off as a comic strip in a newspaper

Inspector Clausau from the Pink Panther movies

The beloved Tin Tin

Adrian Monk the obsessive-compulsive sleuth

And of course Sherlock Holmes, the most brilliant of them all. He's a mostly emotionless, calculating, analytical, deduction-obsessed supergenius who solves crimes out of no sense of justice, but more or less to prove how brilliant he is.

You might have a favorite that I haven't listed.

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About as far away in definition as we can get from great minds, a ship is a large buoyant watercraft. Ships are generally distinguished from boats based on size, shape and cargo or passenger capacity.


Immediately, I think of a sailing ship.

Or a pirate ship.

Here's a beautiful poem that likens a ship with the way we can't see beyond the horizon.



The Sailing Ship - Bishop Charles Henry Brent (1862-1929)

What is dying?

I am standing on the seashore.

A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.

She is an object and I stand watching her

Till at last she fades from the horizon,

And someone at my side says, “She is gone!” Gone where?

Gone from my sight, that is all;

She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her,

And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.

The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her;

And just at the moment when someone at my side says, "She is gone",

There are others who are watching her coming,

And other voices take up a glad shout,

"There she comes" – and that is dying.

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And now to the answers to the brain teasers:

1 – Hustle

2 – Sloop

And there you have the difference between a sleuth and a sloop. How did you do?

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