It’s a super long post, so I’ll post the first question to see if you’re interested in answering the rest of the quiz, or interested to read my answers.
The following quiz consists of 4 simple questions and will tell you whether you are qualified to be a “professional.”
Scroll down for each answer. The questions are NOT difficult
1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?
The correct answer is: Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe, and close the door.
This question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way.
2. How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?
Did you say, ” Open the refrigerator, put in the elephant, and close the refrigerator? ” (Wrong Answer)
Correct Answer: Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant and close the door.
This tests your ability to think through the repercussions of your previous actions.
3. The Lion King is hosting an animal conference. All the animals attend except one. Which animal does not attend?
Correct Answer: The Elephant. The elephant is in the refrigerator. You just put him in there.
This tests your memory.
OK, even if you did not answer the first three questions correctly, you still have one more chance to show your true abilities.
4. There is a river you must cross but it is inhabited by crocodiles. How do you manage it?
Correct Answer: You swim across. All the crocodiles are attending the Animal Meeting.
This tests whether you learn quickly from your mistakes.
According to Anderson Consulting Worldwide, around 90% of the professionals they tested got all questions wrong.
But many preschoolers got several correct answers.
Anderson Consulting says this conclusively disproves the theory most professionals have the brains of a four year old.
My Answers
Hmmph, I’ve always wondered why people are so amused by “logical retardation” like this quiz… there’s always the one that I usually get in real life, where someone throws a punch at me and if I blink or dodge, he’d say that I’m a chicken.
To an unfamiliar face, my usual response is to throw a punch in his face and HIT IT. Isn’t that what you’re suppose to do logically?
Children are naive and do answer these questions correctly because they’re not bound by the experiences and expectations that we as adults learned. Our knowledge bound us to answer things “correctly”, as others expects it, and at this point in life we’re being “graded” because of it, and in the future we’ll be given money because of it.
Here is what I think the correct answers to the quiz should be.
1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?
A: Given the budget and constraint of a typical family household, you will not be able to afford a refrigerator the size of a giraffe. The first logical answer is “impossible”. Without expanding the question, this is an accepable and correct answer.
If, we’re given the freedom of having unlimited resources, we can logically construct a cooling room (in which it is questionable whether it is a “refrigerator” anymore, but I digress), in which you can put it into the refrigerator as intended, although you might want to question whether such a room would be opened the same way as a normal refrigerator.
You’ll probably need more resources such as a cattle prod, or killing a giraffe and fitting the pieces into the fridge.
The question tests whether I tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way. The answer is no. If you want to put a pound of giraffe meat into the freezer, then I’m doing too much; however, the question implies that you must deal with the entire weight of the giraffe, alive or dead. That is a complicated question, and if you answer it too simply you’re just being naive, or, shall I say bluntly, dumb.
2. How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?
A: Same answer as 1, although you will need to consider the weight and size of the elephant now.
I did not consider taking out the elephant, not because I did not think through the repercussions of my previous actions, but because the question did not state whether question 1 or 2 are related.
A test assumes that each questions asked in a test are hypothetical situations and such situations are independent of each other. Even if the two questions are related, I can put the giraffe into one fridge and the elephant into another, thus giving a valid counter-example to the proposed answer, invalidating the conclusion that you must think through the repercussions of your previous actions in order to answer the question as they expected it.
I wonder: did the test creator think about the repercussion that comes with mature logical reasoning before writing down his supposedly intelligent answers?
3. The Lion King is hosting an animal conference. All the animals attend except one. Which animal does not attend?
A: The question states that there is an animal that did not attend. The logical statements therefore should be:
for all X in set “animal”, there exist Y such that NOT A(Y), where A(Y) means “Y attends the meeting”. and X not equal to Y implies A(X).
sadly, the problem gives no information on which animal exists in the set in question, nor are we truly given information since we assume problem 1 or 2 are not related to 3.
If problem 1 or 2 applies, I can still freely release either the giraffe or the elephant and change the answer of the problem, or, in the case that I chopped up both of them before putting them into the fridge, we cannot determine the identity of the animal that didn’t attend.
You cannot name ANY animal since no part of the statement proves any animal is NOT attending; interestingly, you cannot prove any specific animal is attending the meeting either, except maybe for the Lion King himself, since he is explicitly stated as the one who calls the meeting and presumably must attend the meeting.
Therefore, the absolute correct answer should be:
“Not enough information to determine which specific animal did not attend. However, it is certain that Lion King is not the correct answer.”
This problem incorrectly questions your memory when the information given in your memory is not sufficient in proving the problem either.
4. There is a river you must cross but it is inhabited by crocodiles. How do you manage it?
A: You can shoot all the crocodiles before swimming across.
You can build a bridge and use it to cross the river.
You can use a boat to cross the river.
You can feed the crocodiles poison/sleeping pills and swim across when they’re not interested in eating you.
Any of the above, or any other answer that logically satisfies the requirement “you must be alive after you cross the river”. Perhaps the author is not asking for that, seeing that it is not explicitly stated and he/she implies otherwise with the given answer.
Like the person who throws me a fake punch, let’s put this guy into a river full of crocodiles and let him swim across, and we’ll see how correct his answer is.
All in the name of science, right? He has a hypothesis – let’s test it out to see if it’s true then. See you on the other side of the river.