Will this quiz make you feel stupid? Or brilliant? The answer — as is often the case in quizzes and in life — is probably “none of the above.”
But it might be worth your time for one very big reason, which we’ll get to at the end.
The first three questions are stolen from “The 1% Club,” a game show hosted by Patton Oswalt that relies more on critical and quirky thinking than memorizing facts. In the show, the questions start off easy and get progressively harder; in this quiz, all three are tough — brutal enough that a Mensa member could flunk.
They’re also simple enough that a 10-year-old could solve them. Maybe.
The quiz
Answer each of the three questions within 30 seconds. The answer is right beneath each question, so scroll slowly.
You can get this answer in 10 seconds, or try for an hour and give up hope. It depends on how you process those figures in the code. If you see the top left figure as a digital “3” and its mirror image, then you’ll notice the “4,” “5” and “6.” So a digital “7” (answer B) would come next.
But if you don’t notice that, you might choose C because it looks like a digital Scotch on the rocks, which sounds mighty tempting right about now.
This was the final question for one episode’s three remaining contestants (out of 100), and they all flunked. If only they had said the letters aloud, they might have realized that they rhyme. And so does the letter V.
Let’s see: There’s four months between April and August, then another four months between August and December, but then two months … Arrrgh! Or they could just be in alphabetical order. Hello, January.
You can take your time with the fourth question, which comes from a Mensa puzzle calendar. It’s pretty easy — if you know how to do ciphers. If not, you’ll probably come up with a bunch of four-letter words, which pair well with a digital Scotch on the rocks.
The words are alcove, cleave, octave, scurry and trusty. As with the other questions, you could be a brain surgeon who moonlights as a rocket scientist and still fail miserably, simply because your brain is wired differently. Which leads us to …
Why it all matters
A former colleague came up with a way to overhaul the educational system: Have teachers compete to offer nationwide, recorded classes in essential subjects so that every student has a chance to learn from the best on a level playing field.
It’s a brilliant idea. Maybe too brilliant.
As any teacher will tell you, people learn in different ways. One size doesn’t fit all, or even most. If you got all four answers, bravo — but I doubt you did. A visual learner might have loved the first question, a talker the second, an organizer the third, a word geek the fourth. Maybe you’re bilingual or great in math or have some other glorious genius that doesn’t show up on tests, like empathy.
The best teachers, mentors and bosses connect with us in ways that a one-size-fits-all video could not, no matter how brilliant. Maybe we share the same background or laugh at each other’s jokes, maybe they overcame the same biases or blind spots that we’re facing.
As artificial intelligence evolves — over decades, not months — I could see it being used to tailor lots of lessons so they better suited each student’s learning style and interests. One might study the Revolutionary War by analyzing the greatest battles, another with a role-playing game, a third through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves.
If AI took care of the main lessons, teachers might be free to help students one on one, at least acting as educational sommeliers to pair each student with the types of lessons that would resonate with their learning style. If teachers did nothing but help students make sense of their lives, they’d be worth their weight in gold stars.
I hope the quiz also hammers home the importance of diversity in solving problems, in work and in life. Lots of smart people could fail the quiz, but I bet most smart teams would pass.
Certainly diversity can mean different races and sexes, but it can also mean a range of ages and backgrounds. If you and three friends or colleagues have widely varying life experiences, you’ll have more paths to get to the best answers. And more ways to help one another.
As with the months-of-the-year question, sometimes the answers are as simple as ABC. But you have to know where to look.
Murphy Slaw
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