Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to re: Pretty poor test. Many of the questions are meaningless.

The questions are very poorly formulated.
David F Mayer — (archived)

"Sally likes" absurd. If it meant
"The first number of each of these pairs of number shares a simple arithmetical property with which of those numbers listed below?"
One such property is being a perfect square, so the answer is obvious. There are others, however. But the original formulation is absurd. Sally may like numbers for any idiotic and inconsistent reason.

Similarly, "Each number shown below follows a certain rule. Figure out the rule and fill in the missing number" is ambiguous. There are infinitely possible rules which can give infinitely many answers. Here are a few:

The number of vowels in the preceeding month times 5, which gives an answer of 10.

Another rule could be:
January 20
February 10
March 5
April 10
May 5
June 5
July 0
August 10
September 10
October 11
November 15
December 19
Here the rule is the number of friends of the author having birthdays in the given months. It is a rule, after all.
There is nothing said about the rule depending in any way upon the spellings of the respective words. The rule could be completely arbitrary.

To be expressed properly, the question must be reformulated something like this:
"Each of the numbers after the word depends upon the letters and their English grammatical characteristics in the preceeding word in a very simple way."

Even #6 is not clear:
"If you count from 1 to 100, how many 7"s will you pass on the way?"
Does that mean the number 7 or the digit (or numeral) 7? (Not the same thing).
Correct formulation:
"In the decimal representations of all of the integers from 1 to 100 inclusive, how many times does the digit (or numeral) '7' appear in total?"
In this case, since 7 occurs 10 times in the first decimal place, and 10 times in the second, the answer is clear.

If a circle is one, how many is an octagon?
2 4 6 8 12
"If a circle is one" ??? One WHAT. One geometrical figure? One line?
Again, while it is possible to guess an answer, there is no rigorously correct answer since the question itself is not clear. Clearly, the intention is likely to be

28. Which number comes next in this series of numbers? 2 3 5 7 11 13 ?
It is possible for any number to come next, including 2.3822343
Again, the question requires guessing that one is looking for a list of prime integers instead of a solution to a difference equation.
2 3 5 7 11 13

And so it goes. It is a lousy test. "Sally likes..." indeed.

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