Are You Stupid??

1. The first question is unsolvable as given. The long side must be greater than or equal to 4 and less than 7, depending on the angle the two short sides meet at. Future test takers should assume it is a right triangle.
2. This seems a bit culturally biased. There are a lot of very intelligent people who do are not familiar with American history and geography.
3. Aced it anyway.

I'm just wondering how each of the two short sides of the triangle can be both three and four inches in length.

Well, it's a relief to know I'm not stupid. RyanG is right, by the way; you have to assume right triangle to solve the question.

I answered them all wrong and got this message for my trouble:

You got 0/10 questions right!
You are an embarrassment to the human race. Seriously.

I'm not, however, stupid enough to go back to find out what results one gets from other scores!

@RyanG: Triangle inequality => a + b > c and a, b,c > 0. If c = 3, a = 4 => b > 0. If c and a are on the same line, b = 1 or b = 7. Otherwise, b > 1 and b < 7.

I'm a little bit stupid because I didn't know the capital of New York state? How does someone living in a country with George W. Bush as president has the nerve to call anyone stupid?

Technically, the triangle could have angles of 0, 0, and 180 degrees, giving sides of 3, 4, and 7.

They should have specified that it was a right triangle, yes.

pfft. I'm kind of stupid. 8/10 questions right.

I didn't know the capital of NY, and how the heck am I supposed to know the baker's dozen one? That's totally illogical, and I don't even LIKE doughnuts so I never buy any.

Well 10 out of 10.
Though I had to think about the capital of New York.
The capital of Bahrain or Qatar no problem, capitals of US provinces not so well known by me :o)
I just assumed a right angled triangle.

I can't understand why anyone would not know about Albany New York, one of the most important cities in the hemisphere, home of the American Revolution, the place where the first railroad ever built in the hemisphere originated, birthplace of many famous actors and writers, home to H. Melville now and then (he moved frequently) and location of the discovery of electrical inductance, unless it was discovered in France (this is a controversy)!

The fact that it is my home town is utterly irrelevant to the present tirade, I assure you.

And, actually, the answer can be known by any American with even a modicum of geographical knowledge: Brooklyn and Queens are part of New York City, so none of the three can be the answer because if any one is true, then all three are true. Also, New York State, along with Minnesota, Wisconsin, and a few other states, are states where the big giant city is not the capitol, one of those "trick question" states that you learn early in life, in preparation for exactly this type of quiz...

The triangle question is also interesting. If the angle is 180 or 0, it is still technically a triangle but it would be unrecognizable as such, right? Anyway, if you answer that one wrong but all the others correctly, you don't get any bonus points ("You got 9 out of 10 but in this case it is our fault, sorry, we will go recheck our questions..")

Baker's Dozen is also interesting. This is old fashioned, and is now irrelevant in subsets of society where almost everything is packaged. You can't buy a baker's dozen of eggs because there are 12 spots for 12 eggs ... there are no baker's dozen of rolls because machines package them. I can imagine there is an age effect here.

It is said that the "Baker's Dozen" comes from the practice of cutting off the hand of any baker who shortchanged customers by providing fewer than the standard dozen. Bakers tended to add one extra to avoid a shortcoming. Urban myth? It says it's true in Wikipedia, so that means .... well, who knows..

okay, i am going to betray my own stupidity here, but i was thinking about state capitals last night as i was staring at the ceiling in the dark and it seems to me that most (all?) state capitals are NOT the largest city in that state. can anyone name a state where the largest city IS the state capital?

and wow, i never knew the origin for the baker's dozen. of course, it is from wikipedia so ... ah. whatever.

How about Salt Lake City in Utah? It's the state capital and I think it's the biggest city in the state, too.

P.S.: You should say "state capital", not "state capitol"; the former is a city and the latter is a special building.

Got another: Cheyenne, Wyoming. Then there's Denver, Colorado, and Phoenix, Arizona. Not to mention Boise, Idaho; Des Moines, Iowa; Columbia, South Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; Little Rock, Arkansas; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Oklahoma City in Oklahoma. Of course, Providence, Rhode Island, isn't exactly a surprise inclusion on the list.

Ohio is the biggest state (in population) to have its capital in its largest city (Columbus). Runners-up are Georgia, whose capital is Atlanta, Massachusetts with Boston, and Indiana with Indianapolis.

Many states established their capitals before it became clear where their metropolitan centers would be and I suspect a few others deliberately decided the capitals should be in less crowded areas. The state capital is an industry all to itself, after all. Putting it in Los Angeles, using my home state for an example, would have been rather a redundancy, lost amidst all the other business going on in LA. Putting it Sacramento, on the other hand, makes a big difference. What would Sacramento be if it weren't the state capital? Probably just a lunch and fuel stop between Tahoe and SF.

Chicago ... no, wait, that's springfield. Los angeles ... no, no that's Sacramento... Oh, good, Zeno has worked it out. Oh, right, Boston, I even lived there. That's one.

I agree completely with Zeno about how this phenomenon happens. I'll add a twist to it (I think Zeno is implying a little too much planning and possibly even interurban alturism!)

In many cases, the capital is the primary transportation crossroad or harbor, and was thus the first city to start to grow and the first city to actually be connected to most other places in the state and to other cities. Later, the largest city grew up around an industrial level milling site. This applies to many cities in the Mississippi basin on east. Boston, New York, Phillie (to a lesser extent) were monster ports, Chicago = port plus cattle trail and then railroad. St. Paul: railroad and head of navigation (at that time) on the Mississippi, and so on. This pattern does not apply to states that existed and established capitals after about 1875, but does therefore include many of the states north of the Mason Dixon line.

In Minnesota there were many early trade routes and many directions in which trade operated, so there are many towns, even at least one ghost town, that claimed to have been "the most likely capital" or "we were almost made the capital" just before St. Paul got the job. My favorite is Crow Wing. It would have been so much cooler if Crow Wing was the name of our government center rather than some saint.

Today Crow Wing is a series of depressions indicating the locations of former buildings, and that's about it. (Bottle hunters: Don't even think about it. The site is well guarded by heavily armed ladies and gentlemen known as the State Patrol, so leave your shovels home...)

Zeno: Of course, you are right about "ol" ... but I'm lucky to spel my own name rite.