On Sat, 31 May 2008 18:48:52 +0100, Geoff Mackenzie wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
m...

Arny Krueger wrote:

"Pete Wilcox" wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.4.60.0805272118540.27281@squire
On Tue, 27 May 2008, Arny Krueger wrote:

Simply setting up a test this stupid is like flunking an IQ test,
let alone advertising that you screwed up in such an obvious way on
TV.
The depressing fact is that 50 per cent of the entire human race is
below average intelligence...

ducks and runs...

I became acutely aware of that when I served in the U.S. Army. Many
people
in the middle class are blithely unaware of the fact that almost
everybody
they encounter has an IQ 100. I sure was.


The type of people you encounter in the US military depends on the
work you are assigned, and whether there is a war going on. The
dumbest soldiers I encountered were in supply, the motor pool and a few
infantry types who thought anyone who wasn't on the battlefield 90% of
their TIS wasn't military.


As I recall, Richard Feynman was rejected by the US Army after failing
an IQ test. He did not reach the minimum entry levels on anything.
Don't know the US nomenclature at the time, but it boiled down to "too
dumb" even for a grunt In due course he won the Nobel Prize for Physics,
among other things in a spectacular and often extremely funny career.

The easiest way to flunk a multiple-guess test is to know the material
*better* than the author of the test. You spend so much time trying to
guess which wrong answer the author thinks is right that you don't
finish. It's even worse than total ignorance, where you could give
random answers and score about 1/n, where n is the number of alternatives
per question. For most people, it's only a problem on narrow, single-
subject tests, but I can imagine Feynman getting bogged down in a
standard IQ test.