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Narjas Zatat
May 02, 2016
"Share if you understand."
That's the tagline for a mathematical problem which has had over three million shares on Facebook.
People claim that anyone who understands the pattern between numbers has an IQ of 150 (which is widely considered to be in the top one per cent of the population and 'genius' level).
The link in the puzzle goes to an evangelical ministry based in the US and we can't see any evidence that it reliably shows you your IQ whatsoever. ¯\(ツ)/¯
As Presh Talwalker, author of several books and founder of Mindyourdecisions.com points out, there's also no way of knowing whether the three million-plus sharers actually understood how the problem was solved, or if people simply shared it to look intelligent.
So he designed a test for the test on YouTube:
If 6+4= 210, then ?+??=123
Have a go, and scroll down for the answer...
One way we can interpret this problem is that we want two numbers to combine so that the two numbers have a difference of one and a sum of 23.
We have a system of two equations x and y. If we add up these two equations we can eliminate the y variables so we have 2 x = 24 which we then solve as x=12, and therefore y=11.
IQ tests consist of multiple questions, both verbal and nonverbal, so it is highly unlikely that this one question on its own will prove your genius.
Apologies.
It is however, a way to get one up on your friends...
Here's the entire video:
More: Only three per cent of people pass this creativity test: can you?
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