I took the IQ test that the OP posted and it suggested I had an IQ of 134(I am 25 and am job hunting hence have no profession at the moment) which seemed to me to be within a reasonable margin of error(
+20 points...probably -20 points....).
I don't think I am any smarter than most people. However, I do think that I have applied myself more effectively than many. In this way I am not smarter but I have trained myself to try to think along different lines and from multiple approaches compared to "the average" approach. Which is, I think, a more generally useful indication of mental ability than what IQ tends to measure, until you get out into the far extremes in either direction which are anomalous anyway.
If nothing else were wrong with the concept of testing someones raw intelligence, the application of an IQ test score is misleading. Intelligence can not accurately be turned into a linear system without dramatic oversimplification. Furthermore, the accuracy of a score becomes increasingly less significant as you increase the distance from the mean. Lastly, the only thing a test can ever conclusively determine
is the ability of a person to succeed at taking said test!
ok if we are going to talk about questions that are flawed but are in tests:
what is hotter, boiling water, or steam?
talk it over and i'll give you the answer in a day.
I have given some thought to this and have found there to be many layers of uncertainty which could swing an answer.
The first thought is to ask if the boiling water and steam are under the same relative ambient conditions. Second, depending on what those conditions are, the idea of separate water and steam isn't necessarily valid(see "supercritical steam". Generally speaking in practical applications steam can attain a much higher temperature than that of "liquid" water(see "superheated steam"). Let us however discard such thinking and assume that the steam is from a pot of boiling water on a stove in some typical kitchen(neglecting property differences caused by any minor elevation change from steam rising a trivial distance).
A rudimentary analysis of this steam tells us that it begins to cool as soon as it exits the immediate vicinity of its heat source. More precisely, the kinetic energy(on the atomic level) has an increasing probability of decreasing as time and distance increase from the moment/place of the escape of the steam from the heat source. For the sake of practical analysis and simplicity we will then talk in terms of time and space averaged samples.
As the exact nature of the boiling water and the steam generated there from will vary with spacial position let us assume that we are considering a pot with a trivial quantity of water in it(so the temperature is consider the same throughout the content of water and the heat input to the system immediately exits in the form of steam) and are only measuring steam in the immediate vicinity of boiling water.
The last critical point in the analysis, and the point which I think most have overlooked is how we are measuring and defining "hotter." If we talk in terms of how "hot" something feels, using the human sense and experience, then steam is hotter because what we feel as heat is actually heat flux which steam is superior at compared with boiling water as it penetrates flesh quicker. However, if we are speaking in terms of temperature, and bear in mind that the concepts of heat and temperature are distinct and different, then the steam and boiling water in our simplified example should be the same(unless I am forgetting some factor). Suppose, instead that the measure of "hotter" is actually a question of which has more heat in it then the answer is again steam.
If, however and this one is stretching it a bit, we take a approach more befitting a limit analysis(if we think of the transition to steam as passing through a peak) then the boiling water to steam system is at its hottest the moment the water is turned to steam which would make the boiling water the hotter of the two.
There you have 3(maybe 4) reasonable approaches to a simplified system of a vague and imprecise question that each has some plausible argument.
So which is the correct one?
Heck if I know I only have an internet IQ score of 134, but if I had to guess I would say that the question was based on human sense interpretation so steam is the hotter of the two.