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Topic: Smarter than Mensa (Read 21015 times) |
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Olclops
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1. Which of the following five words doesn't belong with the others, and why?
pail skillet knife suitcase card
2. One of the figures below lacks a characteristic common to the other figures. Which one, and why?
3. One of the figures below lacks a characteristic common to the other figures. Which one, and why?
//////// PROBLEM REPRINTED HERE BY MODERATOR
I'm stumped on the words one. I've gotten two valid solutions for each of the geometric ones.
Hints for those: Try counting, mirror planes, right angles, etc.
Any hints for a second solution to the five words would be appreciated. I got the obvious one.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 1st, 2002, 12:02am by william wu » |
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Pietro K.C.
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #1 on: Sep 30th, 2002, 1:32pm » |
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The words were: pail, skillet, suitcase, knife, card, I think.
I don't see an obvious solution. All words except "card" contain the letter "i", for one thing. All words except "skillet" are words you would hear on an everyday basis, for another (I had to Google it, and there is in fact a website: http://www.gfq84.dial.pipex.com/skillet.html  ). All words contain either a "k" or a "k" sound, except for "pail".
I suppose if we go far enough down the lexical analysis, we can provide justification for every single word not to be in there. So let's get semantic.
I think there are plastic versions of everything except "skillet". All of them have handles, except "card". In normal situations, only "knife" can be used as a weapon.
What on Earth is the "right" answer?
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continuum
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #2 on: Sep 30th, 2002, 6:57pm » |
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Here are the solutions I found for questions 2 and 3:
2)
#3 becomes different if you rotate 180 degrees;
#4 doesn't include a triangle;
3)
#1 doesn't include a circle;
#4 becomes different if you rotate 90 degree;
#5 doesn't have a straight line;
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william wu
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #3 on: Sep 30th, 2002, 11:57pm » |
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Here are a few more potential answers:
1) "suitcase": it's the only compound word
2) figure 3: if you rotate it by 180 degrees, you don't end up with the same thing you started with
3) figure 4: it's the only one made completely out of circles
there are still many more good answers; maybe later i'll let you guys know what the "official" solutions are, according to the raisin bran box
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Olclops
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More solutions for #2:
Figure 1 doesn't contain a quadilateral
Figure 6 is the only one with an odd number of straight lines
Another for number #3:
Figure 5 is the only one without 4 mirror planes (it only has two)
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continuum
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #5 on: Oct 1st, 2002, 3:30pm » |
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I think we should be careful with the 'is the only one that' stuff... One could end up with something like 'pail is the only one that starts with p'. Of course all the others satisfy the property 'does not start with p', so pail is different from the others in that way, but it doesn't sound reasonable to me...
I think the objective is to choose a property that the other four satisfy AND concerns them.
Though 'start with p' is satisfied by the subset (skillet knife suitcase card), it's unlikely that someone, if showed the words, would say: 'look, that set has an interesting property: given any of its elements, it (the element) doesn't start with p!'.
For example, for the set (a e i O d), I think the letters O and d could be considered correct answers for obvious reasons. However, I don't think the letter a would be a correct answer, if one justify with: ''a doesn't appear on the word 'boiled'.''
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sluggedbarley
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #6 on: Oct 2nd, 2002, 4:55pm » |
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im not sure on the pictures but as for the words suitcase is the oddball cause its a compound word thats my guess anyways
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gnuzealot
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My guess for #1 is: Card
It's the only object of the bunch that does not have a handle.
How's that for obscure 
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Carl_Cox
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #8 on: Oct 4th, 2002, 6:46pm » |
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1:
card has an odd number of vowels. (Criteria: all even number of vowels)
card is the only one that would be moved by (normal) wind (criteria: stays in most wind)
knife is the most obvious and only intentional weapon (Criteria: not a weapon)
I'm not so sure about the "skillet isn't common" because I grew up with it and don't recall confusing people when referring to one. What are other reasons that pail and skillet may be chosen?
heh - i had to correct spelling skillet twice because i spelled it skillit. That's what a college education got me.
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Kozo Morimoto
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #9 on: Oct 12th, 2002, 6:10am » |
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Quote:| Which of the following five words doesn't belong with the others, and why? |
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The question asks about the words themselves, not the objects that the words refers to, so anything that requires the knowledge of the meaning of the words are incorrect. So answers like handles, wind, weapon are strictly not answering the question. However, these answers would be valid if the question was "Which of the following objects doesn't...".
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Carl_Cox
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #10 on: Oct 17th, 2002, 10:20am » |
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You're right, in part. The question, strictly speaking does not refer to objects. However, words do refer to objects, and thus invoke associated details. I would argue that this remains a valid criteria for choosing a word. If they wanted ONLY words and not associated objects, they should have either made that statement or used words with no meaning (gibberish).
Because english is a horrible, horrible language!
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thelonious
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #11 on: Oct 17th, 2002, 10:14pm » |
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Answer to question one, card does not belong because it is the only word that does not satisfy the condition of "Not rhyming with the word 'lard'". Then again, pail is the only word that sounds the same as another word. Not a homonym, but the other thing.
Obviously, the answer to question 2 is, the characteristic common to all but one of the shapes is "Is not a religious symbol."
And for question 3, symbol 5 is the only symbol that when reproduced in postscript, would present a problem determining which part of the object should be filled or not. It is also the only object that cannot be reproduced by mirroring one half on the XY and YX axis.
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Icarus
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #12 on: Oct 19th, 2002, 12:45pm » |
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on Oct 17th, 2002, 10:20am, Carl_Cox wrote:
Because english is a horrible, horrible language! |
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Whoa! Get up on the wrong side of the bed that morning?
English is a great language! It has more than twice the number of words in common usage of any other. And because of this we can give shades of meaning, and express ideas more freely, than possible in any other language. It is the only language that delights in adopting words and phrases from other languages. Most people consider this "polluting the purity" of their language, but English speakers adopt foreign phrases with a gusto! English did not become the lingua franca of the world by being "horrible".
The problem here is badly designed tests, not the language they are in. You can create questions as bad as these in any language on earth.
(Sorry, you hit a hot-button for me!  )
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william wu
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #13 on: Oct 19th, 2002, 1:16pm » |
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Agreed, English is a fantastic language. I think the aspect of it that we should really highlight though is the tenses. Because we have so many tenses, we can be more precise about who did what and exactly when. So it's great for technical communication. Despite the ambiguities that we come across sometimes (e.g. see "Grammar Distinctions" riddle), English beats a lot of other languages out there when it comes to being precise. For instance, Chinese is a weak language for technical communication because knowing what tense you are in is often left up to context; given a lone sentence you may have no clue whether it happened or is happening or will happen. Russian could be even better than English because they have even more tenses.
Love your answers thelonious
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Obviously, the answer to question 2 is, the characteristic common to all but one of the shapes is "Is not a religious symbol."
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| « Last Edit: Oct 19th, 2002, 1:17pm by william wu » |
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Pietro K.C.
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #14 on: Oct 19th, 2002, 2:38pm » |
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True, I think English is a great language, especially because many of its words are both short and emphatic. I don't know about the tenses, though, as almost all latin languages (i.e. Portuguese, which is my mother tongue) have many more tenses, as does Russian (as Will pointed out).
But, speaking of hot buttons...
English did not become the "lingua franca of the world" by being horrible, but it sure as heck wasn't by being good, either. Do you think that, in the time of the Roman Empire, latin was the lingua franca because of its preciseness? Or that french was in vogue around the 1800s because it was so very chic? That the so-called "civilized world" spoke greek in the time of Eudoxus because of the pretty letters? Come on now.
This concern against "polluting the purity", which you mention in such a despising tone, is merely a struggle against cultural imperialism. We use other idioms' expressions just fine, but when 90% of those are English expressions, something is wrong, is it not? As if it were not enough that the rest of the world is forced to accept U.S. decisions in military and economic issues, we have swallow their lifestyle and ways of thinking?
Don't be so naive to think that, when some English expression finds its way into everyday usage in the context of another language, it does not carry with it some cultural judgment or value. When that happens too often, a country starts to lose its identity, in favor of one which can hardly be considered "better" (I'm not saying it is worse, what I mean is that it is absurd to compare).
Anyway, Icarus, I think you should have a little more background on the OTHER languages before saying the English is the most this, the best that. It is only the scientific method.
Well, as I said, hot button. Sorry about the ranting.
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Icarus
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #15 on: Oct 20th, 2002, 2:46pm » |
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Sorry, Pietro. I did not mean to imply English was superior to other languages. Only that English has many strengths and does not deserve being denegrated as "horrible". My real hot button is not berating English, but an attitude of some in America that we are somehow backwards rubes trampling over the cultured gardens of the rest of the world. While I am sure Carl did not mean this, his comment touched on one of the things these self-deprecators like to proclaim.
Anyway, there is more I could discuss about this and your other comments but this is definitely not the forum for it, so please forgive me my veering off-topic, and let us return to puzzling.
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towr
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #16 on: Oct 21st, 2002, 9:44am » |
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on Oct 19th, 2002, 12:45pm, Icarus wrote:| It is the only language that delights in adopting words and phrases from other languages |
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that's just so not true..
The best thing about english is the written form has hardly changed in some 500 years.. which makes it easy to read old books..
The worst thing, I'd have to say, is that written form and spoken form more often than not don't agree in any 'logical' way..
Two examples to illustrate that point:
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George Bernard Shaw pointed out that "ghoti" could be pronounced "fish".
"Gh" pronounced "f", as in enough
"o" pronounced "i", as in women
"ti" pronounced "sh", as in station
Another example, published in the James Clarke column of The Star runs as follows:
The name Turner, can be spelled "Phtholognyrrh"
"Phth" pronounced "T", as in phthisis
"olo" pronounced "ur", as in colonel
"gn" pronounced "n", as in gnat
"yrrh" pronounced "er", as in myrrh
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it's a puzzle in and of itself..
(they're forgetting context though..)
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Jeremiah Smith
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #17 on: Oct 21st, 2002, 10:46am » |
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on Oct 21st, 2002, 9:44am, towr wrote:
George Bernard Shaw pointed out that "ghoti" could be pronounced "fish".
"Gh" pronounced "f", as in enough
"o" pronounced "i", as in women
"ti" pronounced "sh", as in station |
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Like you said, Shaw forgets context. "Gh" is only an f sound at the end of words, "o" is only "i" in that one case, and "ti" is only "sh" when it's part of "-tion". No English speaker would ever look at "ghoti" and think it was pronounced "fish"; they'd probably say something like "goatee".
Quote:Another example, published in the James Clarke column of The Star runs as follows:
The name Turner, can be spelled "Phtholognyrrh"
"Phth" pronounced "T", as in phthisis
"olo" pronounced "ur", as in colonel
"gn" pronounced "n", as in gnat
"yrrh" pronounced "er", as in myrrh
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With the exception of the "gn", all of those are strange exceptions to the rules...how many words do you know that have "yrrh" and pronounce it "er"? You can't generalize specific cases to general rules. And "gn" is only "n" at the beginning of words...in "gnostic" the n is silent, but in "agnostic" you say the g.
English isn't nearly as bad as these two writers try to make it seem.
Wow. We totally hijacked this thread, huh?
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towr
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #18 on: Oct 22nd, 2002, 8:24am » |
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well.. let continue the hijacking :p
Lets look at: through, tough, thorough, hiccough etc.. (there's a rather nice poem about it somewhere..(after checking there seem to be many actually, use google if interested)) There's no consistency in the pronounciation of '-ough'.. Not even when considering the context.. (Rather a large problem for speech synthesis in my experience.)
There are languages where when you say the phones corresponding with the letters you read you'll get the correct pronounciation all the time.
And here's a riddle, to at least stay in the spirit of the forum, if not the thread
what word is: GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU
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| « Last Edit: Oct 22nd, 2002, 8:26am by towr » |
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Pietro K.C.
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #19 on: Oct 22nd, 2002, 3:37pm » |
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Potato...
GH from hiccouGH
OUGH from thorOUGH or thOUGH
PHTH from PHTHisis
EIGHT from EIGHT 
TEAU from plaTEAU
ThOUGH I suspect you stuck an extra E in...
Anyway, I don't think this kind of ambiguity makes English horrible. I mean, you use this stuff every day, it's not that hard to remember... heck, I do, and I DON'T speak/read it all the time.
Now, for some further hijacking. Sorry, Icarus, I misinterpreted your post. It's just... well, you read the news, I'm sure. I'm brazilian.
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continuum
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #20 on: Oct 22nd, 2002, 6:00pm » |
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I am Brazilian too and totally agree with Pietro...
But, don't think all Brazilians have the same opinions on everything! It would be a big mistake for any country, but especially for Brazil.
English really has much more words than most languages. There are both germanic and latin terms for most things, for example. (Pardon me if I'm wrong, I am not a native english speaker.)
I agree when Pietro says latin languages like Portuguese are more complete in the tense stuff. And I think both the verbal stuff and the vocabulary are both important resources for literature, though I personally prefer the first
About the pronounce problems with English, I would say languages like French and Portuguese are not much different.
And hey, Pietro, I agree with you about the speaking, but you read in English very often! For example, how much time of your day do you spend reading these forums, huh?
Another thing I like in English is that it does not have accents.
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Icarus
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #21 on: Oct 22nd, 2002, 7:15pm » |
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You did not entirely misread my post. I overstated my point, and you were correct to bring it to my attention. English is not the only language that commonly brings in foreign phrases (though I still think it does so more freely than others). And I agree with you that the essential character of any language should be preserved. English is a convenient language for international discourse simply because it is so widely known, and this because of economic and political reasons. I apologize for ill-considered remarks that suggested more.
My take on the strengths and weaknesses of English:
1) English is large. My comment about it having twice the number of common words as any other language is a measured fact, not something I made up. You can view this as a strength or weakness. I see it a strength, since the wide variety of words provides for greater breadth and subtlety of meaning.
2) English does accept new words easily (which is why it is so huge). While this is a growing trend in other languages, and as Pietro points out, unfortunately most of the new phrases in other languages are coming from English, this has been a strong trait of English throughout it's history. And is, I think, a part of the "essential character" of English.
3) While I trust that William is correct about English having more tenses than Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese, or both?), I already knew what Pietro has pointed out: the Romance Languages all have considerably more tenses than English. I would rate English at best a "middling" on this one.
4) Concerning the age of English. Yes, you can read 500 year-old texts in English. That's about the limit: Old English requires special training, and I've heard it is harder to learn than some foreign languages. Most languages can go back much farther than that. Greeks can read Euclid and Plato far more easily than English speakers can read Chaucer. This is the price you pay for easily adopting new words and phrases. English may well be the youngest of the international languages (native to more than one country).
5) Spelling: Yes English spelling is bad. Another adverse side effect of its polyglot nature. But I would contend that many other languages are as bad or worse. French comes to mind as a language which seems to have more silent letters than spoken ones! English may be low down on this scale, but it has plenty of company!
6) Ambiguity: As Pietro has also pointed out I don't have the knowlege to say for sure, but my impression is that most languages have as much ambiguity in them as English. Certainly the French, German, and Greek lexicons I have list several different meanings for most words, just as an English dictionary does.
7) Phonic quality: True, English lacks the beautiful rythyms of the Romance and Oriental languages, among others. But it does have its own beauty none-the-less. Anyone who can listen to Shakespeare performed well and say that English is harsh on the ear is being unfair in their judgement. (Please noone tell me how you think Shakespeare is boring. I am talking only about how it sounds here, not the content.)
8) Ease of learning: I've heard that English and Mandarin are the two most difficult languages to learn. I have no idea as to the truth of this, but it is certainly dependent on the background of the learner. If it is true, then I am very glad English is my native language!
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| « Last Edit: Oct 22nd, 2002, 7:43pm by Icarus » |
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william wu
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #22 on: Oct 22nd, 2002, 10:05pm » |
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Yes, the Romance languages have more tenses; having studied Spanish for 4 years, I dunno why I forgot to note that in my earlier post. Well, the most widely spoken language in terms of numbers of people is Mandarin, just because China has so many people. It beats English by a 2 to 1 ratio (1 billion vs 500 million). So if there was some epic battle between Chinese and English for the position of the world's international language, I guess I'd be rooting for English due to its superior clarity in technical communication, although Chinese is really beautiful.
Expounding on Icarus's note about the difficulty of Chinese: On a spectrum of aesthetics to practicality, Chinese has all its eggs in the aesthetics realm. Its relatively disorganized system makes it very difficult to learn. There is no alphabet, so you memorize words on a character by character basis. This requires a tremendous amount of memory, considering how many strokes traditional characters can have. If you've never seen a particular word before, then unlike in English, you can't even pronounce it, much less know what it means! Pronouncing words correctly is another challenge in itself: every sound has four possible pitches, each of which correspond to completely different meanings, and within the pitches there are usually many homonyms ... homonyms galore. In my Chinese courses here at Berkeley, I've observed that many of the students with no prior exposure to the language can't pronounce most words correctly, even after 10 units (two sems) of study. However this may be more due to relatively limited one-on-one instruction time here because classes are so impacted at this public university. Some more about characters: All the characters are united however by "radicals": elemental characters and strokes which can be combined to produce new characters. Dictionaries are usually indexed by these radicals. To look up a character, you must figure out which of the radicals that comprise the character is the dominant radical. However sometimes there's ambiguity, and linguists can't even agree on what's the dominant radical in a character. So you could end up using trial and error to find the character you're looking for. Now, after you've studied Traditional Chinese characters for a couple years, you could go to China and discover that you still can't understand the newspapers, because in an effort to increase literacy, China has adopted Simplified Chinese, which can look quite different. So to really know Chinese, you have to study two sets of characters for every meaning! Finally, Chinese is actually a family of languages like the Romance languages, and Mandarin and Cantonese are just two of thirteen disjoint languages. So unless you feel like learning them all, you still won't be understood in many areas of China. (However, most peculiar is the fact that all these Chinese languages are united by the same writing system, such that if a Mandarin person doesn't understand a Cantonese person, the Cantonese person can just write down a sentence and the other will understand. No other language family in human history has had this characteristic.)
Despite all these nightmares, I think it's still a great language, because its beauty outweighs all its shortcomings. (Hopefully I've piqued your interest now.) Check out
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/chinese/intro.shtml
to see what I mean. Emphasis on the ideograms, which I've showed to many a white man and they are usually very impressed. (Actually, the majority of native speakers don't know about this stuff either, because they never bothered to think about the origins of these characters ... even my Chinese professors here had no clue.) They really are like puzzles! I always ask myself, why does this character look like the way it does? For instance, why would the word for "to know" be comprised of the "arrow" and "mouth" radicals? Well, "when you have knowledge, your mouth is sharp and far-reaching, like an arrow". I love this deep Oriental philosophy stuff. You may have to install a Chinese language plug-in for your browser to correctly view the right-hand columns of the tables.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 22nd, 2002, 10:19pm by william wu » |
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towr
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #23 on: Oct 23rd, 2002, 2:39am » |
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I always thought english was one of the easiest languages to learn.. Its grammatical structure is relatively simple compared to many languages..
The problem with learning languages like chinese is that most people that don't allready speak a similar language can't differentiate between the pitches of phones. It simply isn't an issue in western (and many other) languages, so we learn to hear them as the same letter..
Babies can actually differentiate all the sounds, but they forget how to do this after some three months, I think.. They pick up which sounds are important to differentiate from the speech of their parents and forget the rest. And its very hard (if not impossible for some) to relearn. The next problem is producing those sounds, pretty much the same problem again. If you haven't learned they are different you can't pronounce them different..
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Pietro K.C.
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Re: Smarter than Mensa
« Reply #24 on: Oct 23rd, 2002, 8:35pm » |
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Ye, English really isn't all that hard to learn, compared to Romance languages, for example. One simple reason is verb conjugation, which I think most people who speak only English are barely aware of. Consider the verb "to walk", which in Portuguese is "andar". The prefix "and" is called the root, and "ar" something I forget, but all verbs in Portuguese end in "ar", "er", "ir", and there are at most a dozen that end in "or". In different verb conjugations, the root does not change (well, for regular verbs, that is), but the suffix varies wildly. In English, the possible forms of "to walk", in the simple present, are:
I walk
You walk
He/She/It walks
We walk
You walk
They walk
In portuguese, however:
Eu ando
Tu andas
Ele/Ela anda
Nós andamos
Vós andais
Eles/Elas andam
In English, the future tense is achieved by placing a "will" in front of the infinitive of the verb:
I/You/He/She/It/We/You/They WILL walk
In Portuguese:
Eu andarei
Tu andarás
Ele/Ela andará
Nós andaremos
Vós andareis
Eles andarão
In English, to indicate the past tense, you generally just append an "ed" to the end of the verb's infinitive. In Portuguese, there is another set of conjugations. Similarly, conditionals and potentials, which in English are achieved by the use of the "might", "may", "must", etc. correspond to a variety of other verb tenses and conjugations in Portuguese. Not exactly a walk in the park! We don't differentiate between pitches, though, and use the arabic alphabet, which I guess makes things easier.
Another thing is the accents, which continuum mentioned: the word "organ", in Portuguese, is "órgão". "Blessing" is "bênção". And so on. I've actually heard the exact opposite, that English is one of the easiest to learn, though I'm in no position to judge either - I only know English, Portuguese and French, and the last two are very similar.
As side points, I think every language on Earth is subject to ambiguity; and also, I love the phonic quality of English! The words are short, emphatic, full of impact - it has a lot of attitude, or, in the hands of Shakespeare (who just rules, I bought a cheap copy of his complete works about a year ago), emotional thrust.
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"I always wondered about the meaning of life. So I looked it up in the dictionary under 'L' and there it was --- the meaning of life. It was not what I expected." (Dogbert)
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