IQ tests offer a formula that allows you to compare yourself to other people and see how average (or above average) your intelligence is. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is dubbed the world’s shortest IQ test because it consists of just three questions. It assesses your ability to identify that a simple problem can actually be harder than it first appears. The quicker you do this, the more intelligent you appear to be. Here are the three questions: 1. A bat and a ball cost £1.10 in total. The bat costs £1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? 2. If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? 3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Here is what a lot of people guess: 1. 10 pence 2. 100 minutes 3. 24 days These answers would be wrong. When you're ready, scroll down for the correct answers, and how you get to them: 1. The ball would actually cost 5 pence or 0.05 pounds If the ball costs X, and the bat costs £1 more, then it will be: X+£1 Therefore Bat+ball=X + (X+1) =1.1 Thus 2X+1=1.1, and 2X=0.1 X= 0.05 2. It would take 5 minutes to make 100 widgets. Five machines can make five widgets in five minutes; therefore one machine will make one widget in five minutes too. Therefore if we have 100 machines all making widgets, they can make 100 widgets in five minutes. 3. It would take 47 days for the patch to cover half of the lake If the patch doubles in size each day going forward, it would halve in size going backwards. So on day 47, the lake is half full. In a survey of almost 3,500 people, 33 per cent got all three wrong, and 83 per cent missed at least one. While this IQ test has its shortcomings – its brevity, and lack of variation in verbal and non-verbal reasoning - only 48 per cent of MIT students sampled were able to answer all three correctly. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Scientists think they have found an explanation for what scientists thought was a “runaway” black hole speeding through the universe. Last month, scientists reported that they had seen what appeared to be an object unlike anything seen before. What originally appeared to be scratches on Hubble images was actually a black hole that had been thrown out from its home galaxy and was now speeding through the cosmos, scientists said. Astronomers had come to that conclusion after spotting a long trail of stars, formed 8 billion years ago. It was a stretched out, narrow shape, roughly the same size as our own Milky Way. Last month’s study suggested that those stars were the wake left behind from that runaway black hole. As the black hole travelled through a gas cloud, it left behind the right conditions to start forming stars, that study suggested. It was shock and a breakthrough for a number of reasons: it was unprecedented, and required a number of different conditions for it to be true. That led astronomers both to celebrate and question the theory, and in the time since other researchers have been working on their own ideas. Now scientists at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have suggested their own, more ordinary explanation of the unusual, long star structure. They suggest that it is in fact just a flat or thin galaxy – one without a bulge that makes it wider – that is being seen from its side. “The motions, the size, and the quantity of stars fits what has been seen in galaxies within the local universe,” said Jorge Sanchez Almeida, an IAC researcher who is the first author of the article, in a statement. “It’s a relief to have found the solution to this mystery, the new proposed scenario is much simpler. In one sense it is also a pity, because the existence of fleeing black holes is expected, and this could have been the first one to be observed.” The team compared the mystery structure with another, much better known galaxy, named IC5249. That is near to us, has a similar mass of stars, and doesn’t have a galaxy either. They found that it was surprisingly similar. The stars were moving in similar ways to those found in closer, comparative galaxies, researchers said. That led scientists working on the new paper to suggest that it is a relatively normal and expected galaxy, rather than an out-of-control black hole. But they hope that further observations will shed further light on what exactly it is doing – and could still allow the galaxy to prove of interest to astronomers. “We also looked at the relation between the mass of the assumed galaxy and its maximum velocity of rotation, and discovered that indeed it is a galaxy which behaves like a galaxy,” said Ignacio Trujillo, an IAC researcher who worked on the study. “It is an interesting object, because it is quite a large galaxy at a very large distance from Earth, where the majority of the galaxies are smaller.” The proposal is reported in a paper, ‘Supermassive black hole wake or bulgeless edge-on galaxy?’, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Read More Aliens may intercept human communication ‘within next 100 years’, study says Powerful auroras likely this week due to rare ‘backward’ sunspot Meteorite crashes through roof of New Jersey home Aliens may intercept human communication ‘within next 100 years’, study says Powerful auroras likely this week due to rare ‘backward’ sunspot Meteorite crashes through roof of New Jersey home

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