The Mensa Genius Quiz-A-Day Book

by Abbie F. Salny and Mensa

Book Overview

Test your wits with this all-new collection of mindbusters from Mensa, the high-IQ society. Master puzzler Abbie Salny provides a fun brainteaser, logic twister, math mystery, or word game for every day of the year. Whether you're mathematically, verbally, or visually inclined, you're sure to find twelve months' worth of exciting challenges inside.Included with each puzzle's solution is the percentage of Mensa members who answered it correctly, so...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201135493
• ISBN13: 9780201135497
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Da Capo
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Challenge Yourself

"The Mensa Genius Quiz-A-Day Book" contains 366 puzzles (including one for leap years). The puzzles cover a wide variety including cryptograms, picture puzzles, math puzzles, riddles, palindromes, Tom Swifties, and more. The book is divided into months and at the start of each month there is a description of how the month got its name and some other interesting facts about the month. The answers are at the back of the book and each answer tells what percentage of Mensa members got the right answer for that particular puzzle. "The Mensa Genius Quiz-A-Day Book" is a good book for people who want to keep their mind active by doing at least one puzzle a day. The puzzles are varied in such a way that if you find a puzzle tough one day, the puzzle the next day won't seem as hard. My favorite puzzles are the word puzzles (palindromes, anagrams, riddles, mini-mysteries, etc.) while I'm not too fond of or particularly good at the math puzzles. For the most part, the book is evenly divided between the types of puzzles, but there are a few times when it seems like there are several of the same type of puzzle in a row. Although the book says Mensa, you don't have to be a Mensa member to do the puzzles (I'm not). The answer section gives a detailed explanation of each answer, which ultimately helps you solve similar types of puzzles. By the end of the book you should be able to solve or at least have an understanding of how each puzzle works. "The Mensa Genius Quiz-A-Day Book" is hours of challenging fun for everyone.

Creative pleasure!

I have purchased several of the Mensa books. There is a challenge to outwit the Mensa and I offer it to my friends on occasion in the form of a game.

Smart Remarks:

I bought this book prior to my taking the aptitude test that got me into Mensa. It was both fun and helpful and I at least felt a little smarter coming out the other end. I would recommend this book to anyone contemplating taking any similar test or just for a fun and challenging read. I sent this and a couple of other Mensa books to my niece and nephew. It went over pretty good with everyone in the family.

Fun book, and then some comments on high IQ's

I've belonged to a couple of high-IQ societies, including Mensa, in the past, and once talked to Dr. Salny over the phone about IQ equivalents for the MAT, or Miller Analogies test, which was the one I qualified on for Mensa. Dr. Salny, who was at the University of New Jersey at Rutgers the time, was very helpful in that regard and I wanted to mention that. This is a great collection of puzzles put together by Dr. Salny to help you keep your mental muscles tuned up, whether you're a Mensa member or not. In fact, one of the things we've learned about the brain over the last 50 years is that in many ways the brain is truly like a muscle--use it or lose it. I was a grad student in the brain sciences and also formally studied the IQ and psychometrics area for a while, and I had some comments about the problems with testing high IQs that I thought I'd post here, especially on the problem of testing very high IQs above 150 or 160, particularly for adults. Various writers, researchers, and members of other high IQ societies have attempted to solve this problem by constructing their own tests and standardizing them. They also claim to be able to standardize these high-end IQ tests using various special procedures and statistics. However, the problem of standardization for these sorts of tests has really never been resolved very well. Hence, many claims of IQ's that high are really just that--claims. That isn't to say that people who score high on things like the Mega test or the Langdon LAIT and so on might not have IQ's of 180, just the reliability and accuracy of such scores isn't that great. The other problem is that the human brain is quite complex and we really don't know how to adequately test its capabilities except in the crudest sense. Most IQ tests examine a half dozen factors at most (although the well-known DAT, the Differential Aptitude Test, looked at 9 factors, but then it was technically an aptitude test and not an IQ test) and there are actually dozens or perhaps hundreds of factors involved. The eminent cognitive psychologist and psychometrician, J.P Guilford's Structure of Intellect model postulated 120 different types of intelligence (most if not all of which I find more convincing than the more standard factor models). Another problem is the factor subtests still correlate highly with each other; for example, the typical verbal subtest correlates at the .75 level with the math subtest, although the spatial ability tests seem purer. A .75 "r" or correlation means that half the variance in one test is accounted for by the variance of the other (since the variance is the correlation coefficient squared). Hence, the factor subtests aren't very "pure," as they say, and correlate too highly with verbal skills which is too narrow a subset of skills and also is likely the most socio-economically influenced. That having been said, ironically, the most egregious criticism of IQ tests is that you can show that the most complex IQ test k

FUN

This is a very fun book for those who can't get enough of logic puzzles. There is a wide variety of puzzles in this book. Buy this book and you too can look forward to solving a puzzle a day!