posted July 20, 2015 10:58 AM            

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Originally posted by Faith:
@Odette

(edits again- gotta stop staying up so late.)

Interestingly, the "intuitive" answers were always the wrong ones. Isn't that a pretty transparent insult to the word intuitive? And it denies the value of intuition in mathematics....

Perhaps some of you have seen this documentary about Daniel Tammet...

The Boy with the Incredible Brain

If I remember correctly, he holds the record for reciting Pi to the 20,000th digit in 5 hours. He does this intuitively. The numbers just come to him, encoded in symbols.

His natal chart is impressive: http://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Daniel_Tammet

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posted July 20, 2015 11:12 AM            

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Originally posted by hannaramaa:
I believe the correct answer, I just don't get how we were supposed to know the ball cost 5¢ when the only clie they gave was that the bat was $1.00 more. Math was never my strong suit. Or trick questions, lol.

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Yeah.. the test is annoying!
The thing is - if the two items together cost $1.10 and the bat costs $1 more than the ball - the ball can only ever cost 5 cents. There's no other possible answer.

Say the ball costs X cents. The bat would cost X + $1 (or 100 cents) - and the total is $1.10 (or 110 cents).
X + X + 100 = 110
2X + 100 = 110
2X = 10 (you subtract 100 from 110)
X = 10/2 = 5 (so it can only be 5¢)

posted July 20, 2015 11:32 AM            

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Originally posted by Odette:
Lol I kinda wish I had a Virgo Mercury for a day
It took me a couple of minutes to picture my whole Terminator scenario haha
I'm pretty sure that proves I'm more intuitive than analytical though!

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posted July 20, 2015 12:22 PM            

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Originally posted by 12muddy:
Lol yes. This was what I thought. Half of my brain was churning out answers, and the other half was like "This sounds weird" the whole time.

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Until I saw their answer I wondered how they expected me to account for the area between the curves of the lily pads:

As I was saying, it's really impossible to cover the surface area of a lake with lily pads...unless you overlap. And even if you overlap, the doubling of lily pads in one day would not be enough to actually take them from covering half the lake on day 47 to covering the whole lake on day 48. You still have to factor in the remaining area that needs to be covered after they double, and how long it takes to grow that amount of lily material. Perhaps you could take partially-grown lily pads and use them for filler, but that will still take you back to day 46.

You know?

Or, pardon me, am I being too "intuitive"? LOL

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Originally posted by 12muddy:
This reminds me of the time when one of the quizzes that popped up in my math test went something like "The velocity of a rising rocket is 5km/h..." Such mind-f*ckery lol.

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It's almost like the test-makers are saying, "You don't want to grow up to be mathematicians do you? Because then you'll end up quasi-sadistic like us (and threaten our job security, but that's totally besides the point.)"

posted July 20, 2015 12:31 PM            

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Originally posted by Odette:
Yeah.. the test is annoying!
The thing is - if the two items together cost $1.10 and the bat costs $1 more than the ball - the ball can only ever cost 5 cents. There's no other possible answer.

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I was thinking, "What sales tax rate did they factor into this?" God my mind is so stuck on real life.

quote:

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Originally posted by Odette:
The test itself implies that the analytical answers are always the correct ones.

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That's what they want you to come away with, but they didn't bother to ask about methodology. When I first saw the bat question, the number 5 did pop into my head, but I dismissed it, dealt with the tax issue for a second, then dismissed the whole problem as useless. As with the lily pad question, there was an unknown variable, and it annoyed me.

Anyway if I had just taken the 5 as a legitimate back-of-the-mind calculation, they would have called it analytical.

But it wasn't.

Sorry if I sound annoyed.

posted July 20, 2015 04:09 PM            

If I gave it 'time' and thought about it for a second, I got all analytical. My fastest analytical answer was the lily pad because my intuitive mind could quickly attach itself to the words 'double' and 'half'.

My question would be, for those who answered all analytical, did you get the answer in less than 3 seconds? I think that would be more of a barometer to determine the accuracy of the test itself.