Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Good, good, one. April 17, 2007
Very enjoyable! Pleasured to leave stumped, think about & return to solve.
 not IQ tests March 8, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book uses its title to fool you into thinking you will be taking actual IQ tests. Not so. The authors have compiled "brain teaser" type questions and called them IQ tests. On top of that, many of the questions are the "cutesy" type, the kind you don't get the answer to and then when you see the answer you think, "Oh, man! I never would've gotten that!" Don't waste your money. If you want a book of IQ tests, there are others out there, TRUE IQ tests. This book is a scam.
Fun puzzle book April 29, 2005
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This fun book is divided into four sections: Elementary Level, Challenging Level, Master Level, and Comprehensive Supertests. As you might guess from those section titles some of the tests are much easier than others and within the tests some types of questions are much easier than others. Each test series contains a wide cross-section of different types of puzzles so you are tested thoroughly. For example, there are diagrammatic puzzles, probability questions, crosswords, cryptograms, anagrams and other questions that really don't fit neatly into any of these categories. Self-scoring answer sheets complete the book and let you know approximately where you fall. I found that it was not uncommon to vary by as much as ten points around a median.
Fun to do and interesting, The Big Book of IQ Tests is recommended to anyone who enjoys solving puzzles.
Do not buy this 'Loser' book, period. September 26, 2003
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
As to the criticism of there being many culturally biases (or more accurately, culturally loaded) questions, I think this criticism as it applies to this book is not a legitimate one. However, there are MANY other problems with this book and the writers as well as the publishers SHOULD be ashamed of putting their names on the cover. There is very little in this book other than the tests and what is supposed to be a scoring matrix. There are two pages in the beginning that is haphazard and unrelated nonsense that seems to have been written by someone who was on a jag and riding a rough subway ride at the time. Such paragraph long topics such as what crossword puzzles are, and who invented the rules of what we now recognize as probability, etc. That's right, these paragraphs are there and unrelated to each other and also do not relate to anything else in the book. The last such paragraph explains that mensa does not recognize these tests as legitimate IQ tests, and then we are off to the races, as it were. The answer section to the first test has no weight for each question. I suppose we can assume that they are each worth one point each. The other test answers however do tell us how to weight each question (how many points for that question, even if it's just taken to be one point.) Here's the real kicker that prompted me to write this rebuke. The last section called `Comprehensive Supertests' is comprised of two tests. Number 1 test is comprised of three questions and the Number 2 test is comprised of 12 questions. `Long-story-short, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO GRADE THESE TESTS OR THIS SECTION. The other sections has shown that the ceilings for the tests in each section is exceded on the scoring matrix. This is all well and good as long as we can make sense of the weight of each questions and can `add-up' our score. In the `supertest' section, the scoring matrix does not work if we give each question one score point, and since we can assume that this section has the ceiling exceeded as the other three sections did, yet we do not know how to weigh each question, THEN THIS WHOLE SECTION IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SCORE. It seems that the authors Norman Sullivan and Philip J. Carter earn a failing grade in their attempt at an IQ test book. Save your money for people who earn it.
 Title is misleading. March 8, 2002
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
This book's title is misleading. It should be titled something like "The Big Book of Brain Teasers". It should NOT have the words "IQ Tests" in its title. If you want an accurate assessment of your IQ, look elsewhere. Here's why:1) It contains too many culture-specific questions. A valid IQ test (i.e., one that "accurately" measures one's intelligence quotient) should contain few, if any, culture-specific questions. This book contains a lot of them. 2) It also contains too many questions that have multiple "correct" answers. Once again, in a properly constructed IQ test, for each question there will be one, and ONLY one, correct answer. This book contains numerous questions that could be answered "correctly" in more than one way. In short, if you enjoy solving puzzles, etc., for fun, then you MIGHT enjoy this book (I say "might" because you may very well end up being frustrated by the multitude of questions which could be answered "correctly" a number of ways), but if you're looking for a properly constructed IQ test that will give you an accurate measurement of your intelligence, you'll likely be disappointed. I sure was.
|
