Doing the Mensa web IQ test at http://test.mensa.no/, I was puzzled by this exercise.
I understand that asking for answers like this kind of defeats the entire purpose of the test, but it's stuck bugging me. Does anybody else see some sort of a logic in this? Most questions in this test flow both left-to-right and top-to-bottom, but it's possible that this one doesn't because
the last question doesn't either.
Answer
Discussing this with some friends, it was suggested that the correct choice is
5, ie. bottom row in the middle
because
the puzzle is a form of simple addition. The first two pictures are added together, producing the third picture. Overlapping squares produce a large square, but beyond that there is no "overflow" so a small square plus a large square still produces a single large square. Note that this solution only works without question when reading the puzzle left-to-right; when reading top-to-bottom, the meaning of the alignment of the picture (whether the squares are on top of or below the horizontal line) is unclear.
I gamed the test a little by repeating it and seeing how different choices for this question affect the scoring, and I think this answer could be correct, but am not completely sure.
EDIT: I gamed the test a bit more by selecting the top left choice on every question until 29, and selecting the correct choice after that; this way the test gives a score of 91 if all choices are correct, and 90 if there is one mistake after the 29th question. I went through all the possibilities for question 34, and it appears that there are two correct answers:
3 (top right) and 5 (bottom middle)
Which means that both this answer and the one by prog_SAHIL (and Jan Ivan, who also suggested the same choice albeit with a more mathematically sound reasoning!) are correct.
No comments:
Post a Comment