re: The Intelligence Test That Thomas Edison Gave to Job Seekers

Damn good test.

Edison was a genius, but he was also something of a crackpot. Among other things, he publicly electrocuted animals, including an elephant, in trying to prove the danger of A/C current, which was competing with his D/C current. I have a hard time seeing the relevance of most of those questions to the kind of work his employees would have been doing. And they're certainly not relevant now.

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I stopped reading after the poor grammatical syntax in #16...

You're better than that, Tom...

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Ending a sentence with a prepostion is acceptable.

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This should be posted in the Millennials thread.

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The Chicago Tribune sent reporters down to the University of Chicago to see how students would fare. They asked them each 20 questions and nobody did well. Male students averaged a score of just 35 percent. Female students? Just 28 percent. The newspaper warned that this was a sign that kids these days were getting dumber.

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That is a terrible conclusion to make.

I would go Sheldon Cooper at the DMV on him.

For example, on #25 he asks where we got Louisiana. I would need clarification as to whether he means the original Louisiana Territory or the present-day state of Louisiana, because the Louisiana Purchase included only part of the present-day state.

For #41 he asks the largest and second largest state. Does he mean by land area or population? Although he specifies Rhode Island as the smallest state in #42 which implies land area, one cannot simply assume he means land area in #41.

There is a similar flaw in #43 and #44. The distance from New York to Buffalo and from New York to San Francisco depend on the mode of travel. While it impossible to travel from New York to Liverpool by road, one cannot assume air travel because transatlantic flights were not available at the time and travel from New York to San Francisco by boat was extremely slow and inefficient.

There are at least three possible answers to #61. Coke can be a carbonated beverage, slang for a narcotic, or an ingredient in steel.

For #76 how specific does he need the answer to be? The generally accepted answer of 93 million miles is an approximation, and the actual distance varies throughout the year because the Earth's orbit is not circular. And the sun is a ball of gas that unlike the Earth does not have a clearly defined surface.

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Posted by JonaYolles
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I got 145/146.



No


No, you didn't.

Unless you mean you got that many wrong.

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no. He did it, I was there. It only took 8 minutes for him to be the answer all 146 questions and also be the first reply. My man has a helluva brain.

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Not that I know of

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Haha

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Could you work for Thomas Edison?

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Of course not, silly. He's been dead for a long time now.

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61. What is coke?

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so it was a drug test too?