Can YOU pass the world's shortest IQ test?

I found them all easy to work out once I carefully read the questions. Had I been speeding through them, I might have gotten the first two wrong. Only the third question I figured out right away.

This, by the way, is how a lot of people get multiple choice questions wrong. Sometimes an answer seems obvious but once you read the question carefully, you end up realizing the obvious answer is not the correct one.

Re: "But geometry was like a language."

If a cone be cut by a plane through the axis, and if it be also cut by another plane cutting the plane containing the base of the cone in a straight line perpendicular to the base of the axial triangle, or to the base produced, a section will be made on the surface of the cone by the cutting plane, and straight lines drawn in it parallel to the straight line perpendicular to the base of the axial triangle will meet the common section of the cutting plane and the axial triangle ...

See? Simple prose :-)

This is Apollonius of Perga, and of course he's just getting started. We, or some of us, learn this in HS as Analytic Geometry - using modern "analytic" methods and notation, of course.

A footnote in the Loeb Library edition, which has the Greek and an English translation, notes:

Apollonius followed rigorously the Euclidean form of proof. In consequence his general enunciations are extremely long and often can be made tolerable in an English rendering only by splitting them up ; but though Apollonius seems to have taken a malicious pleasure in their length, they are formed on a perfect logical pattern without a superfluous word.

The only geometry I remember was the prescription for finding the angle of the dangle.

It is perpendicular to the bisector of the bore of the hole.

[bows]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.