This week is exams week.
Which roughly translates to OMG do whatever the hell I can to not study for exams week.
I guess this is one of those things. 
Here’s a bunch of questions I encountered today that’s supposed
to help you judge whether someone will be a good Consultant. This is not
really specific to IT consultants, but the point is useful anyway.
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Q1. 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.
Q2. How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?
Did you say, Open the refigerator, 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.
Q3. 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 were the one who just stuffed the elephant into the refrigerator.
This tests your memory.
Okay, even if you did not answer the first three questions correctly, you still have one more chance to show your true analytical abilities.
Q4. There is a river you must cross but it is used by crocodiles, and you do not have a boat. How do you manage it?
Correct Answer: You jump into the river and swim across. Have you not been listening? All the crocodiles are attending the Animal Meeting.
This tests whether you learn quickly from your mistakes.
According to a consulting firm using this test, approximately 90% of the professionals tested answered incorrectly but many preschoolers answered several answers correctly.
One conjecture: most professionals don’t have the analytical powers of a four-year-old.
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Now, I fully realize that this isn’t a “ask this questions on a job interview” kind of advice, but more like “here’s something to break the ice”. But I would bet large amounts of money that some bozo hiring manager in some consulting company will actually use this as a criteria for hiring someone.
love these questions and have used these myself for training in outside the box thinking.
It’s nice to think that these questions test outside the box thinking, but they don’t. For three reasons.
1. You’ve put a picture of a giraffe that is clearlytoo big to fit in a fridge next to the first question. So the answer “open the door and put it in” is wrong, because you know the giraffe will not fit.
2. If you ask people a series of questions, there is no reason to think that they are related, unless you indicate this in your question.
3. Calling it “a” refrigerator is confusing too. Nobody said it was the _same_ refrigerator.
So “How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?” “How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?”
becomes
” “How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?” “How do you then put an elephant into that refrigerator?”
I don’t think many people would get _that_ “wrong”.
Yup, anon got it right, that’s exactly what I was thinking when I read these questions.
For a bit of context, these questions were taken from the lecture slides for an “Intro to Commerce” courses. These are a 100+ students that enter UofT’s (pretty posh) commerce program and will go on to become the accountants, financial gurus, and (!) managers of tomorrow. And like I said, I bet someone will think, “Hah! This is a clever way to test people’s intelligence!”, even though it does no such thing.
igor and anon, I think you’re both wrong. It DOES test your intelligence. And if you’re asked a series of questions, there IS the chance that they’re related. Personally, I think it’s pretty funny.
It does test your intelligence, in a backhanded way. If you get the answers to these questions “right” then you are thinking in an illogical manner. I would only use this test for fun, as this blogger would.
I do agree that it’s fun, for a bit, but also immature and if you play things like this on people all the time, they will eventually not want to be around you.
I answered:
1: Cut the giraffe up and put it in the fridge.
2: Cut the elephant up and put it in the fridge.
3: The Lion King’s mother-in-law
4: You put the crocodiles in a refridgerator, apparently.
Yeah, I started off by chopping up the animals. Then I noticed the little notes that go with the last three questions. Then it was pretty simple. Stick the giraffe into a big fridge, then to make the third question work, you take out the giraffe, and put the elephant in, making the elephant absent from the conference. That just leaves question four, which was simple once you realised they were linked.
that a tricky question but i figured it out
these questions were in my philosophy course, just for fun, and I only got one half right. I’m so ashamed. :/ It’s worse because I remember these questions from only a year ago, when I stumbled across them online.
I think this is a valid set of questions to test certain workings of the brain. After answering the first and/or second questions incorrectly, the quiz taker should absolutely be expected to learn from their mistakes.
anyway, i thought it was fun and there’s no need for anyone to get all worked up over them.
These are all questions of logic. I primarily use these type of questions when training people on using logical reasoning (especially as a basis for designing the logic for computer programming) first as a base to further analysis or other types of reasoning or structures.
I’ve never found anyone who could answer these questions outright the first time (because usually they don’t expect it), but it breaks the ice. Once the answer is given and discussed, it definitely gets them thinking in a certain direction and ‘enlightened’ so to speak.
Seo (SEO) may be the process of improving the visibility of any website or a site in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid search results.
However, since the answers to each of the questions are predicated on the assumption that each answer is dependent on the previous question, and this assumption was never asserted as a parameter to the questioning. Would it not follow that the answers are invalid based on the fact that there is no reason to assume the questions are correlated?
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I took me less than one minute in Google to find this “animal stuffed in an icebox” story. I heard it in 2006 at a conference and forgot all about it until a recent email challenging the way our brain works was sent to me by a friend, and I had to share the “icebox” story with him. Thanks Google!
These kinds of questions are answered best by imitating Groucho Marx. If you can do a good Groucho, you’ll get along fine.