(FB 1550627670 Timestamp)
—“Q: 5 +1 * 10 = ?”—
This category of math ‘tests’, is not a test of intelligence but of a weakness in mathematical grammar that makes the reader fall back to the order of operations when the sentence is malformed. The correct form is (1×10)+5. or 5+(1×10), gracefully failing to 5 + 1 * 10 if malformed.
Almost seemingly complex questions of philosophy are nothing more than a failure to fully expand idiomatic speech into well formed sentence beginning with “I promise that …”.
The lower your patterning the more likely you are to see this trick. The higher your patterning (not discreetly seeing the individual glyphs of the text) the more likely you are to miss it. And that is all.
Tricks don’t test intelligence.
They insult it.