My point was, that the test isn’t impossible. It’s stupid, and requires you to really read some of the questions, but it’s not impossible.
I had to apply for a job recently, and they made me take an aptitude test. They gave you two hours to take test, and any time beyond that would impact your score negatively.
I don’t think that I didn’t get the job because it took me three hours to take the test, but it’s entirely possible that the footage they might have viewed from the hidden cameras recording me as I took the test probably did the trick… I suspect that they looked at each other and said “Hell, we can’t hire that guy… He’s got Tourette’s syndrome…”
I’m not a big believer in tests like that, but I approached it in the spirit that it was given, because I do like a challenge. There was a math section, a logic section, and a reading comprehension section.
In the reading comprehension section, they had a question that went something like this: “You are a zookeeper. You have four lions, A, B, C, D, and you have two tigers, E, and F. You have six stalls, three on each side, facing each other. Lion D Must occupy stall number six, the tiger stalls cannot face each other, and Tiger E must be next to lion C...” and so on.
So here I am, diagramming out the stalls, putting lions and tigers in different stalls to see what works. I think I spent about 20 minutes on that question, cussing under my breath to myself the entire time things like “Geez… What kind of idiot thought of these questions?”
So I get all the way through that question and thought, “thank God I’m done with that one…” And as I turn the page to look to the next question, it’s another dumb ass lion and tiger word problem! I almost fell out of my chair…
There was one problem that I admit made me slap my forehead in frustration when I figured out. The question went like this: (if you’ve ever seen the movie “Blade Runner”, I felt like the replicant being questioned at the beginning of the movie… :-)
” As a gift, you’re given a special acorn to plant for tree that doubles in height every day. After 10 days, the tree is 40 feet high. On what day did the tree reach 10 feet high?”
So I grab my pencil and calculator and think to myself “Man, I haven’t done any kind of algebraic equation of any significance since I got out of college 30 years ago…” And I start trying to figure out the answer. Here I am, my browse all furrowed, I’m scribbling square root signs and stuff like that and puzzle over this for about 10 minutes, not making any headway. I realize that I’m burning up too much time on this, so just at the moment I decide that I’m just going to skip the question to leave it blank, the answer pops immediately into my head: the answer is day number eight. I realized all you had to do was start at the end, cut the height and half and subtract the day until you reach a height of 10.
I admit that I had to laugh at that one, I simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees. When I really get engrossed in something, I can occasionally miss the obvious!
>> So I grab my pencil and calculator and think to myself...
Too bad you’re not a programmer! Think power of 2 and work backwards. No calculator needed. 8 days, yeah?
( You’re probably an analog engineer or one of those other engineers with *genuine* skills.)
Loved the anecdote! Thanks for sharing it!
"Really reading" some of the questions reveals ambiguities that are impossible to resolve logically, unless, as yarddog has pointed out in #183, you guess what they are asking. If you have to score 100% then I would think it is otherwise impossible on the basis of question 27 alone because, as far as I know, it is impossible for a curved line to be straight at a single spot. Perhaps some geometry expert can correct me on that particular question, though.