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Friday Fun Thread for April 18, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anybody down to take an online IQ test? It's not timed but according to the site takes up to 20 minutes to complete.

Feel free to share your scores. I'll go first.

Full Scale: 138

Memory: 136

Verbal: 137

Spatial: 141

I'm not surprised my memory was the lowest of the three, I feel like I've always had a bad memory (and I hate that card game called Memory where you flip over the cards to make pairs.) I always wonder if the synonym thing is really the best way to measure verbal intelligence: I just don't care to memorize obscure words which I feel drags my score down but it just seems like a waste of time to remember words that I never encounter and can simply look up the other 99 percent of the time that I'm not taking an online IQ test. Besides that, if I can imagine that a word means something else, that isn't really valued in this test either, but it would be useful if I was writing poetry or a song or something. (Like if the word is "big" and a syononym option is "ebullient," I know that ebullient doesn't mean big but spiritually, to me, it has the essence of bigness...) But I guess the intelligence to override my imagination is what the test measures. I'd rather be imaginative than book smart though, really. The spatial portion was probably the closest to measuring "imagination" in that you need to imagine the shapes rotated in your mind. I feel like I used to be much faster at this, I found myself rechecking my answers quite a few times (of course the test was untimed so I could do that without penalty.)

Despite being an ESL peasant I thought I had a pretty solid vocabulary for English, but there were quite a few words here I had never seen before. Does the list include some words that don't even exist? :P

I got a much worse score than I did on a clinically administered full battery test (in my native language) as a younger man. Perhaps aging and my chronic health issue have wrecked my brain more than I expected, or this test isn't comprehensive enough to give accurate results. Did get more confirmation of the fact that my memory just doesn't work that well though. Now I feel a bit more impetus to actually try to improve it, so taking this test wasn't a waste of time.

Does the list include some words that don't even exist?

Yeah, I remember doing well on previous vocab quizzes posted here but there were some suspicious head scratchers in this one. It's not so much that I wasn't sure what they might mean so much as even as a native speaker I'd never seen them before. Didn't stop and check though.