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Want to brag to all your friends about how you are smarter than someone with a Harvard or Yale education? Now is your chance! A 3 question IQ test just resurfaced and is making the rounds, with a fail rate of over 80%.
This mini-test was part of a study done in 2005 by an MIT professor Shane Frederick, who administered it to over 3,000 people from all walks of life, including students attending Yale and Harvard.
The results of the study reveal that only 17% of those who took the test got all 3 questions right, meaning the fail rate was about 83%.
Want to challenge yourself to this test? Here is our version – same math, different values, so you can’t cheat if you’ve already seen a similar question!
A lawn has a small patch of grass growing in one corner. Each day, that patch of grass doubles in size. If it takes 46 days for the grass to fill the entire lawn, at what day is it half full?
Did you say 23 days to reach the halfway point? Good guess, but you’re wrong!
The grass doubles in size each day, it doesn’t increase at a set rate. This means that on day 45, the lawn will be half full of grass. The next day the grass doubles, so it will be completely full.
If it takes eight machines eight minutes to produce eight bouncy-balls, how long would it take 150 machines to produce 150 bouncy balls?
Did you say 150 minutes? Whoops, not quite right.
We can see in the initial set up for the problem, it takes each machine eight minutes to produce one bouncy-ball. But we have 150 machines working on the problem, so it will only take them eight minutes to produce all 150 balls.
The price of an ice cream cone and a scoop of ice cream in a dish is $1.10. If the ice cream cone costs $1 more than the scoop of ice cream in a dish, how much does the ice cream in the dish cost?
If you said the ice cream in the dish cost .10 cents, you would be wrong. Common mistake!
The ice cream in the cone costs $1 more than the dish, so if the dish cost .10 cents, the total would be $1.20. The ice cream in the dish cost just .05 cents. Add $1 to that, and the ice cream cone cost $1.05, bringing the total to the proper $1.10 amount.
How did you score on the test… better, or worse, than Harvard students?
