very large spring traps baited with peanuts? - an IQ test question
Friday, February 23rd, 2007 - 11:30am
I figured I'd offer this one up to the Goojer brain trust:
my daughter was recently tested for her school district's gifted and talented program. One of the questions she got was the following:
"if an elepant is a mouse, and a mouse is an elephant, what does an elephant have to watch out for?"
my kid and my wife both came up with "cats". I, on the other hand, responded with "himself" (That Carl Jung, always getting his collective unconscious into everything!).
I suspect that there's no one correct answer to this one; rather, it's designed to gauge creative thinking and logic. I'm actually pretty curious about the genesis of the question, but can't seem to find any reference to its use as a "stock" question in these sorts of tests.
Any educational psychologists have any insight? of at least a clever answer to the question?
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Hell, I think the tread title is an awesome answer.
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I'm with the Doctor. That, or get all Kobayashi Maru on their asses.
RIP ChronicNecrosis
I think the answer is "mice." Elephants are afraid of mice, right? Well, the sentence kind of says, "X1=Y2, Y1=X2". If X's are afraid of Y's, then X2 (the mouse-that's-an-elephant) is afraid of Y2 (the elephant-that's-a-mouse).
Unless they mean it at a purely psychological level. Obviously an elephant that thinks it's a mouse won't be afraid of mice, or afraid of elephants to a point where that'd be a reasonable answer. And if it's a direct X=Y, substituting only the words, then yes, "cat" would be a good answer.
NOTE: This is not a doodle bug.
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Should be afraid of Hillary Clinton... or Downey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PlNzARV0XM
But actually I think Lobster might be on to something.
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For all who live in such times, it is not for them to decide. All we get to decide is what to do with the time given to us
Mirrors
If elephants are afraid of mice (as the old cartoons teach us) and elephants are mice, then they'd freak out when they saw themselves in the mirror. Right?
Fedaykin98 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
I would think it would be holes in the wall. If a mouse was an elephant, he would try to go home and bonk his head on the wall, since he wouldn't fit through the mouse hole anymore. Head bonks are teh suxxors.
"I'm up the spout!" - Jeremy "Nyles" Greenfield
I hate dumbass questions like that that are so poorly written they could mean anything.
"All that time you waste dating and having sex could be better spent scouring the web for new game developer press releases." - Quintin_Stone
Ricky Martin. Or Dolph Lundgren.
"THE HELL ASS BALLS." - Prederick, expressing frustration in the time-honored way.
running with the "cats" answer....
how about if we reverse the syntax, "if a mouse is an elephant, and an elephant is a mouse, what should a mouse watch out for", would the appropriate answer then be "ivory poachers"?
"For business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity"
I'm with Lobster, but that's after a lot of training in logic and the like. Probably as a teen I'd have come up with something crazy, like guys with ray guns who change elephants to mice. I mean, that would create the situation in the first place.
"Sometimes I go around saying, 'Kommisar Paulson has seized the commanding heights of the economy!'" - Paul Krugman, asked if recent changes to banking are socialistic.
I would have said "Mice". Now they have rational reasons to fear them, on top of the irrational ones.
Hyperbole - THE BEST THING EVER
I think "cats" is still the most obviously "correct" answer of the bunch...just because you're calling it an elephant doesn't make our new elephant any bigger or less of a target to a feline.
Barring that logic, I say "lactose intolerance".
I accrue pens like Hefner accrues bimbos. -- duckideva
I agree on the balls. Not a fan of the balls. -- wordsmythe asserting himself in OOC Theater
Also, I'm with Alien13z. It's a retarded question.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
Actually, I think he said it was a 'gifted and talented' question...
But my answer is, "itself".
If an elephant is a mouse and a mouse is an elephant, then doesn't mouse=elephant? I guess that would be kind of like the mirror thing...and like Chuck's original Jungian response.
The answer is clear: terrorists.
Elysium: The democratization of the web ... has installed an illusion of a digital first amendment that protects speech no matter how poorly spelled or stupid.
XBL: E Munnie
elementsofmeaning.blogspot.com
Awesome!
Near as I can figure, the only thing you could be looking for with a question like is specific interpretations of the question. "If an elephant is a mouse and a mouse is an elephant"? Are you sh*tting me? That means that either mice and elephants are the same, or that they've changed places, so to speak, or they are both two things at the same time, or elephants and mice are actually all elephants. It's also possible that 'elephant' and 'mouse' are templates that describe mutually exclusive attributes, meaning that something could be an elephant and a mouse with no confusion at all (in the same way that I am a man and a software developer). At this point, there is no indication what either an elephant or a mouse is (because obviously you can't use normal interpretations of the word, as, normally, mice are not elephants and vice versa).
As to "what does an elephant have to watch out for", is that an elephant, or an elephant-that-is-a-mouse, or an elephant-that-could-also-be-a-mouse, and what constitutes an elephant, anyway? Considering 'elephant' for the question is not a real world elephant, who knows what they have to watch out for? And what do they mean by "watch out for"? Maybe an 'elephant' is some sort of sentry. In that case, elephants need to watch out for approaching enemy forces. Or maybe icebergs.
Non-contextual, non-specific, nonsense questions. Unless it's purely looking for thought processes, retarded question.
MechaSlinky wrote:
-on L4DNow you're on the list, bub. Right under *Legion*.
How does it feel, hmm? How does it feel?
Fedaykin98 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
Really, it's just bad code.
Elysium: The democratization of the web ... has installed an illusion of a digital first amendment that protects speech no matter how poorly spelled or stupid.
XBL: E Munnie
elementsofmeaning.blogspot.com
I used to be in a medical research study for people with diabetes. Every year they would do a psych profile that included the question "Do you ever feel that there is something seriously wrong with your body?" Well no sh*t there's something seriously wrong with my body, that's why I'm in the study. But I'm pretty sure that answering yes to that question was not the "normal" answer.
"All that time you waste dating and having sex could be better spent scouring the web for new game developer press releases." - Quintin_Stone
Getting swatted with a broom wielded by a frantic housewife, of course. That's an easy question.
I'm not lost. I'm locationally challenged.
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Ivory Poachers
...with cheese.
pascal's wager is a fool's bet
wouldn't it also follow that it should be wary of elephant poison?
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...Or hundred foot tall housewives with cleavers.
pascal's wager is a fool's bet
Silly bastards.
The correct answer is:
GLOBAL WARMING
Fedaykin98 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote: