If you want to check how intelligent you are, the shortest IQ test in the world, which has recently become popular again on social media, can help you with that.
The world’s shortest IQ test consists of three questions, and users on TikTok test their intelligence by trying to answer them.
This IQ test was actually called the “Cognitive Reflection Test” and was part of a research paper published in 2005 by MIT professor Shane Frederick.
If you answer all the questions correctly, you will be considered “smarter than 80 percent of humanity”.
Psychologist Frederick asked the same questions to 3.428 people over a period of 26 months. Of all those people, only 17 percent answered all three questions correctly, and 33 percent answered all three incorrectly.
The questions are:
The bat and ball cost a total of 1.10 dollars. The bat costs 1 dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
If you got any of these questions wrong – don’t worry because Frederick designed them to “give impulsive wrong answers” where your brain would “jump” to the wrong conclusion before you realize your mistake.
For the first puzzle, the answer is that the ball costs five cents, which means that the dollar-cost bat adds up to 1.05 dollars, and together they would be $1.10.
The second question is the one that usually trips up many, but the real answer is five minutes. The time does not change regardless of the fact that there are 100 machines involved.
Finally, the answer to the third question is 47 days. Most say that 24 days is the correct answer, but it is not. Every day the water lily doubles in size, so every previous day the water lily was half as big. So, if the water lily takes 48 days to cover the lake, then on the penultimate day, the 47th day, the water lily covers half the lake, Klix.ba reports.
E. Dz.
