Customer Reviews

Succeed at IQ Tests: Improve Your Numerical, Verbal and Spatial Reasoning Skills

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I wasted money on this book as preparation for the Mensa IQ test.

Why wasted? Because many of the questions are general knowledge, not tests of IQ. IQ tests are designed to test reasoning, not knowledge.

So how can the authors justify questions like the following?

- What is the name given to a group of arrows? (test of vocabulary, not reasoning)
- Find six birds? (hidden in a matrix of letters - only an ornithologist would recognise some of the birds in the solution)

even more obscure is this one on page69:

Place these items in three sets of three (fish, trees, drinks)

BLOATER ANISEED CURACAO KOUMISS REDWOOD POLLOCK POLYPUS DOGWOOD PERRIER

(the experts may know that koumiss is a drink and polypus is a fish, but I didn't).

The botanists might also like "Prunus domestica is to plum as Vitus vinifiera is to:"

cherry, prune, pomegranate, peach, grape (it's grape, perhaps the "vin" gave a clue).

It is hard to believe that one of the authors is an "IQ test expert" as mentioned on the book's cover.

So in short, this book did not help me to prepare for the Mensa IQ test at all.

Luckily I still passed.

This book has some great, difficult questions to get the brain working. However, many seem specialist - for example I have never heard of the heraldic term 'gules' - and it was in a word search of 'heraldic terms'.
There are also some mistakes in the answer sections which can be disheartening.
One example: an equation to simplify and find x had '2x7' in the question but '2+7' in the answer explanation. They can't even copy their own questions correctly.
Also, call me stupid, but have you heard of Malmsey? I hadn't - it's a sweet fortified wine, originally made in Greece. Again, this was an anagram.

This book offers no tips on how to improve and some questions are questionable..

Is another good collection of pretty damn tough puzzles but not a training book as such. Just lots of puzzles. Hard ones. I don't know if I've got dumber as I've got older or if IQ test type puzzles have got more difficult?