Fill in the blanks. Answers Thursday.
1. What ladybugs are to aphids, bloodhounds are to - .
2. What communists are to sleeper cells, - are to marigolds.
3. Tomatoes are to cucumbers, what airplanes are to - .
4. Picasso is to astronauts, what - is to Columbus.
25 points for every right answer. Anyone getting a fifty or better receives prize.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
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45 comments:
1) beggin' strips
2) Mother Mary
3) Tug-boats
4) Hieronymus Bosch
1. Chihuahuas
The analogies were my least favorite part of the SAT. In fact, I got every other question right on the verbal with the exception of the analogies. So instead of my (relatively) sucky 640 I would have had an 800. And now there is no analogy section.
Boo.
Brett has a better answer to question 4 than I myself had. Nice work, Brett!
1. Toy Poodles
2. Iowa ditch weed
3. Semi-Trucks
4. Akron
There are no right answers, only culturally rooted ones.
That's the PC answer, right?
1. What ladybugs are to aphids, bloodhounds are to - muskrats.
2. What communists are to sleeper cells, aphids are to marigolds.
3. Tomatoes are to cucumbers, what airplanes are to gliders.
4. Picasso is to astronauts, what astronomy was to Columbus.
Curtis, the first response of yours is genuine and beautiful the second and sadder one is more reminiscent of our current time in which the arts have fallen into the hands of politicos who would never have imagined writing a poem themselves and so imagine that those who are writing poems are just dreary political hacks like themselves. To take the arts back from these people is now nearly impossible, but they can be laughed at, and discouraged, whenever it's possible. They can have their noses rubbed in their idiocy from time to time.
Maybe then they will go back to being jailers and finks and ward heelers or whatever they were in other generations.
I was especially delighted by 2 and 4!
Perhaps whatever answers are particularly delightful are correct, and for me at least, 2 and 4 rocked.
1 and 3 were a bit too logical for my taste, and so they sucked, somewhat. In aesthetics, logic is counterindicated.
Well, I take it back. There's a strong logic in your 2 and 4, but it's an inverted billowy logic. Very nice work!
I wish that this was how all my comments and all my posts went!
1: people
2: gardeners
3: trains
4: Aristotle
2. Men in the moon
3. Helicopters
4. Magical realism
The correct answers were:
1. Prisoners.
2. Capitalists.
3. Helicopters.
4. Velazquez.
Congratulations to all of you who answered.
Craig actually hit helicopters, which surprised me, as my answers were somewhat arbitrary. Brett's response for 4 was probably more accurate in a sense.
But Velazquez is Spanish which rhymes with Picasso's nationality. The timing for Velazquez is a bit off -- he's not born until 1499, so he comes after Columbus, and I should have a painter who's getting older as Columbus discovers the New World.
But I was impatient.
Brett's tugboats for helicopters is a fancy and nice idea: one tends to forget about tugboats, but what could be more picturesque than a tugboat going past the Statue of Liberty as winter turns to spring, and seagulls cruise, and Emma Lazarus' poem burns on its plaque, misrepresenting the statue (which was about the wish for Republicanism on the part of the French who donated it), and turned it instead into a beacon for the Russian Jews getting slaughtered in pogroms in their shtetls.
Oy vei and all that.
Curtis' ideas were good, too.
But fortunately no one got two right, so I don't have to shell out any prizes.
I reiterate: analogies are retarded.
G.M. - I disagree, actually.
The ability to understand relationships between objects, and how those relationships can be abstracted to other objects, is a pretty important part of intelligence.
('objects' can be defined loosely in the above)
And of poetry.
Of course, without multiple choice, it's near-impossible to come up with the Same analogy as someone else...
But in standardized-test form, they make perfect sense, as long as you know the vocab...and even then, if you know a little bit of Latin, you can use all sorts of deductive reasoning to figure out the correct answer to an analogy even if you Don't know the exact meaning of all the words. This requires a lot of intelligence...
I think you hate them just because you suck at them.
I suck at spatial relations, but understand its importance, and that it denotes a certain kind of intelligence which I don't have much of.
I would actually think that the analogy section would be the favorite of a poet, no?
Brett: the problem was I did know the vocabulary and I could make justifications for all of the options.
Analogies are subjective and therefore shouldn't be on aptitude tests.
Perhaps you ran into some poor analogy writers.
And perhaps you're right that there is, of course, Some vague relationship between every word that exists, and if you want to you can extend that relationship to another pair of words.
Maybe.
Examples would be good here -
But Another level of intelligence, at that, is the ability to understand what a test-maker (person) is looking for.
This in an of itself is perhaps the most useful type of intelligence - finding a way of figuring out the expectations of another human being, and learning to play to that.
It might not represent the perfect intellectual universe one would like to live in, but this ain't the kingdom of heaven.
It's the kingdom of earth, and it's smart to learn how to do such things.
Even given that, we need to look at some specific questions for me to really believe what you're saying.
Maybe you live in a more black/white brainworld, and therefore have a problem with degrees (the Best answer, not just a Possible answer, ya know)?
Here are some practice examples...tell me what you think the answers are, GM...
1. COLOR : SPECTRUM
tone : scale
sound : waves
verse : poem
dimension : space
cell : organism
2. HEADLONG : FORETHOUGHT ::
barefaced : shame
mealymouthed : talent
heartbroken : emotion
levelheaded : resolve
singlehanded : ambition
3. SEDATIVE : DROWSINESS ::
epidemic : contagiousness
vaccine : virus
laxative : drug
anesthetic : numbness
therapy : psychosis
Well, that's it for now - took it on the GRE website, and I got all 3 correct...
I know I am necessarily viewing things from a subjective viewpoint (in that I'm not God and all), but the correct answers seem pretty objectively correct...
1: tone to scale (color is a specific part of the spectrum and a tone is a specific part of a scale)
2: harder--headlong and forethought are opposites.
"mealymouthed" if it meant less timid and more poorly done would work but I think it's barefaced and shame--that is, you can have shame with something you do or you can be barefaced about it. It fits the weird noun/adjective thing too.
3: anesthetic to numbness.
But here's the problem with 1: each of them is a specific part of the others. So your other options could be correct but, as you say, one is more correct.
Anyway, I think it's a silly word game and not an assessor of aptitude.
GM should be correct on these three, right, Brett?
One thing I really struggle with in tests is where you have a bunch of migrating dots on some kind of grid and are expected to find a pattern of movement such that one of four or five new blocks in the sequence represents where the dots should be next.
I'm just dazzled by those.
And fail them generally. It seems quite arbitrary to me.
Kirby - I feel like I either get those in the first few seconds, or never...
Yes, GM's 'final answers' are all correct, though his complaints don't hold water...
The 'better' answer is always the one that is More specific and More detailed...more relevant, therefore - you were right with the answer being barefaced and shame, but not specific enough about the relationship, which is why you got mealymouthed as a quasi-possible answer...
Headlong and forethought are not just 'opposites...'
To do something in a 'headlong' way is to do it WITHOUT forethought.
To do something in a 'barefaced' way is to do it WITHOUT shame.
So it has to do with the relationships of the words beyond just 'opposite.'
You put 'tall' and 'short' in there (obvious opposites), and the correct answer would still obviously be barefaced/shame.
There are degrees of how tight the analogies are, and the tighter/closer the analogy, the more right an answer.
I think there is a link here between your dislike, GM, of analogies, and your dislike of Two Kingdoms.
Brett:
I don't have a "dislike" of two kingdoms. The philosophy behind two kingdoms is a heresy and a mockery of Jesus' life and sacrifice.
Analogies, otoh, are just stupid.
Brett, I'm interested in your interpretation of why GM's hatred of analogies and hatred of Two Kingdom's go hand in hand.
Can you explain?
I can try to explain, though it's more of an intuitive relationship than one I can easily explain at this point.
In both instances, GM seems to have a knee-jerk dislike for those things which allow for or describe or require multiple distinctions on a continuum.
He paints with too broad a brush in both.
For analogies, he talks about words being 'opposite,' when in fact there is a finer distinction than that...
To do something in a 'headlong' way is to do it WITHOUT forethought. A much finer distinction...
He thinks that the same laws/rules/instructions/words from Jesus apply in all different realms... (since he only believes in one realm, not two).
I think it's this dislike o' the separation of realms that is at the heart of the dislike - and in analogies, you have to go through a lot of different realms to get to the 'better' answer (not only are two words in an analogy opposites, but the first is an adjective, and the second is a noun, and the adjective has to do with the absence of the noun, yada yada yada.)
It's also his problem of dealing with the world (and human nature) as it Should be (from his point of view), not as it actually is.
Thus, analogies should be TOTALLY CLEAR CUT and there shouldn't be an answer that fits with the broadest distinction (opposites) and Also a Better answer that includes more and finer distinctions (as seen above).
It's something about expecting or calling for perfection in this world, and seeing things in black and white, and being unrealistic about it (thus, Lincoln was a war criminal and we don't need a standing military and if you think the baptists who stole haitians were wrong you also have to think Harriet Tubman was wrong, regardless of the distinctions between their situations)...
Is the underlying, related pattern popping out at you yet?
-Brett
p.s. G.M., I still <3 U!
Brett, this was funny, and I think you're on to something.
We need to explore GM's denomination more to see if this is part of his group, or unique to him as an individual person.
He's such a baffling guy!
I could understand the Tubman-Baptists in Haiti comparison (although the comparison wasn't rigorous, it was comprehensible), the lumping of all warriors into one basket (Lincoln as Hitler, Agamemnon as Hyppolite, Zhukov as Pickett) seems bizarre, but I think from his viewpoint, there are no distinctions of scale or intent within warfare.
Sin, likewise, has no scale on his scale of values.
I have no idea how this would work in the real world if it were made presidential. The current president is bad enough (and I am atrabilious enough to advance daily this temerarious judgement).
Brett,
Maybe.
Oh speaking of, I am going to be in Denver April 7-10 if you want to have some booze together.
Some distinctions:
He thinks that the same laws/rules/instructions/words from Jesus apply in all different realms... (since he only believes in one realm, not two).
Jesus' example applies to Christians at all times. One can't expect the unsaved to behave like Jesus but the whole point of being a Christian is to be a follower of Jesus.
It's also his problem of dealing with the world (and human nature) as it Should be (from his point of view), not as it actually is.
I am not committing a Humean fallacy. I am viewing the world in a realistic sense. If you should love your enemies, then you shouldn't kill them, even if you want to free their slaves or take their land or make them into lovers of democracy.
I understand that war happens. However, I also refuse to support any war for any reason except a defensive war. If some folks march over here and try to take us over and threaten to kill or harm my family (however extended a family it might be) I will happily sit on the top of my roof with my Mosin-Nagant and my excellent marksmanship and pop their heads & shoot their helicopters out of the sky.
But only if they come over here. Jingoism is Imperialism is Perpetual war. All bad for people and other living things.
My whole "we should follow Jesus" thing applies to confessing Christians. If we say we're going to follow Jesus and believe in his words then we should, as he tells us to, put our lives on the line and walk the walk.
I think killing someone
and loving them
could happen at the same time.
Though there is a distinction between
the type of love you have for your neighbor, and the type of love you have for your father, and the type of love you have for your wife, and the type of love you have for your dog,
and the type of love you have for a stranger.
The lattermost seems to be that, all things being equal, you want the best for that person, and mean them no ill will, and want them to be saved by Christ.
But in certain circumstances, I think you can believe that while, at the same time, killing the person.
G.M. seems to have a worldview in which ethical thinking is anathema, or impossible, or at the least undesirable.
He probably views the Potter Box as sinful.
Since there are no loyalties but to Christ...
Though I would argue that when translating loyalty to Christ to behavior on this planet, one has loyalties and principles that have to be weighed.
G.M. is moral, but not ethical.
Sigh.
The Potter's box is fine for Christians if your set of values comes from Christ and your loyalty is to 1) God and 2) your fellow man.
There is no distinction between stranger and neighbor. See the story of the Good Samaritan.
And this is the only planet we have. If Jesus only wanted us to follow him in some nebulous new Jerusalem that would one day come maybe then why on earth did he appear on Earth?
The setup for your principles disallows for ethical probing.
"Offensive war is always bad!" means you have taken same intensity/unbendingness of your faith in Christ and transferred it to principles & things of this world, which is almost what automatically happens when you go flatout monokingdom.
It causes a conflation of the certainty of ones faith in the supernatural with ones faith in moralistic ideas relating to the natural.
You create a false God out of moral precepts. Which is why you're a promoter of heresy, and not so much Kirby (when Kirby gets his more controversial/heretical streak goin', it seems to come mostly from a place of pushing the envelope to see where the boundaries are. When you do it, it seems to be out of a place of entrenched belief).
Sorry Brett:
How about "offensive war is always sin" since that's what I've said.
Anything not done in Faith is sin, sayeth St. Paul--and one can't be faithfully following Jesus in faith and killing your enemies. You're supposed to love your enemies and heap kindnesses upon them.
Ordinance is not kindness.
GM, think of the Jews in WWII, and how intervention was required to save them. Killing their enemies was saving our friends.
In the Cvil War, we needed to free the slaves, which required killing their masters.
In Afghanistan, in order to free the women, and allow democracy to take place, we had to destroy the Taliban. In Iraq, something similar was required when we took out Saddam and his evil sons.
North Korea is a very poisonous nest, but it has China behind it, and is going to be a very tough nut to crack, as is Myanmar, also backed by China.
The Sudan is a mess.
Haiti is a mess.
Just War theory is something that even Mennonites can get in on to some degree. Stanley Hauerwas has commented on it, for instance.
It's an old tradition going back to Augustine, and goes through Aquinas, and Luther.
We had to stand up to the Nazis, and now have to stand up to one-party states such as the Communists and the Taliban, in order to preserve the idea of liberty.
It's important that human rights be held as universals, from the fetus through the infirm, and everywhere in every nation.
Lincoln was right in every fiber of his body when he freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation.
What a man! What a soul!
GM, think of the Jews in WWII, and how intervention was required to save them. Killing their enemies was saving our friends.
The following cannot be said loudly enough or often enough:
NO ONE FOUGHT IN WORLD WAR TWO TO FREE OR SAVE THE JEWS. TO THE EXTENT THAT ANY MEMBER OF THE ALLIES KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON REGARDING THE JEWS THEY SUPPRESSED AND HID THE INFORMATION. THE ALLIED NATIONS FOUGHT GERMANY TO PREVENT IT FROM HAVING ANY POWER AND TO ENSURE "WORLD PEACE" THROUGH UNITED NATIONS DOMINATION
Having said that, the "final solution" of Hitler was tragic and vile. We often forget that Hitler killed not only Jews but another 6 million--the mentally disabled, homosexuals, the Roma.
Of course, this pales in comparison to the 20 million killed by our ally the USSR and the 65 million killed by Red China.
But they're our friends, so going to war to stop them from killing 7 times as many people wouldn't have been "just war."
"Just war" is fucking bullshit. If you're going to claim that "freeing the slaves" or "preventing genocide" is a reason to kill other people, then you'd better suit up and go shooting as there's a hell of a lot of slavery and genocide going on right now.
Oh but wait, you don't want to do that--neither do you want to hold the Allies to task for the behavior of the USSR and China.
America fought in World War II because Japan attacked us, and then Germany declared war on us.
The other allies fought in WWII because the Germans were trying to destroy/take over their territory.
We were helping 'em out because they were being attacked, and we had been attacked/declared war upon.
Is that not a just cause for engaging in war?
Funny that you put World Peace in quotations. The UN has done a bangup job of helping maintain peace in the developed world. Of course, they didn't bring peace to the Entire world, but that's a pretty hard task..
Why you think peace is bad, and you want to be sarcastic about it, I don't know...
Brett:
There has not been a day without state-sponsored violence since the creation of the UN. And not just in the "undeveloped world" either.
The UN's idea of peace is perpetual war. That's why I put it in quotation marks.
And if we were defending our territory from attack by the Japanese that would be just. Killing their civilians is not.
JUST WAR doesn't mean widowing all the men in your community. You have to stand a chance at winning, and winning rather soon. There has to be a clear end to it, and it has to be necessary.
Fighting China or Russia after they had nukes?
Doesn't fulfill the criteria. Best to pursue very polite diplomatic channels with them.
Dem Russians are getting better.
Dem Chinese are awfully hard on the Tibetans.
But there's nothing we can do about it without getting ourselves blown to ribbons. There's no point in that.
JUST WAR is a very complex and realistic doctrine.
Of course you can fit the whole doctrine into one page, but it's still very complex.
Unlike the stealthcare thing that requires 3000 pages, and no one has read it, and now no one will even have to vote for it, to be passed, it's going to be deemed, whatever that means, which means that no one is responsible for it, and yet it will destroy American industry, and corrupt our entire political system permanently.
Thank goodness for the tea party people. Oh my goodness.
If the election were held now, I doubt if Obama would even get 20%.
Kirb, ussr=no nukes in 1945 but still evil; china=no nukes 1948 but still evil. widowing the enemy is also bad form.
Patton or MacArthur (I forget which) did want to do in both China and Russia at the time, and said as much, that if we let these creeps continue, we will have to deal with them for hundreds of years. Who came in after Roosevelt 2? I think it was Truman. Truman had had enough of the war, and didn't pursue them.
It was somewhat like McClellan letting Lee go after Gettysburg when he had him by the throat.
We had just been through a horrible battle both times, and didn't have the heart to continue.
Once communist societies form, they are VERY difficult to take back, since they are one-party systems. I note that Myanmar is going to allow a multi-party election, but they made it impossible for any other parties to register in time.
Aung San Kyu is forbidden to run because she's technically a prisoner. Precisely because she ran and almost won last time.
Give war a chance, GM!
Perpetual war has been the hallmark of history.
The wars have gotten smaller.
And there are a number of neighbor-nations that will not go to war with each other for a very very long time, if ever.
It's an improvement.
Not perfect, of course.
But a big improvement!
The UN stopped war in Europe...not in the World, but in Europe, and that's a good start!
...
Just because war is sometimes necessary and advisable when dealing with troubled states doesn't mean that's it's always necessary or advisable when dealing with troubled states.
We don't think in 'alwayses' the way you do, GM. Sometimes I think you are arguing against a mirror of yourself, when in fact we are not opposite of you in moral stance, but rather in ethical approach.
...
Because the world is full of muck and mirk and mud and one situation is Not the same as another and you have to take a whole bevy of variables into account to try to figure out what the best thing to do is with the current circumstances...
It's almost impossible to know what the 'right' thing is when the time comes, and it's even still hard when you have hindsight... The underlying faults in your worldview come to the fore in this discussion: a lack of distinctions between realms, and the kind of faith in oneself or ones denomination that should be reserved only for ones faith in God.
The UN stopped war in Europe...not in the World, but in Europe, and that's a good start!
Spain
Ireland
Yugoslavia
Again you assume that my faith is somehow in myself or my decisions. This is blatantly false. You seem concerned with the "mud and muck" as you say of this world. I have no idea why. Paul clearly tells us not to be conformed to this world.
As followers of Christ we must follow him--his life, words, and actions.
Otherwise we might as well be unsaved.
GM, when I use absolutes (the UN Stopped War in Europe!) it's as a way of simplifying and making a point clear...
Of course war did not Totally cease...
I obviously was denoting the incredible peace that existed in Europe for most of the UN's existence.
Exceptions here and there, some kinks that had to be worked out.
And of course the peace came from lots of others things besides just the UN.
But the U.N. was part of an approach in the Western world that led to the incredible peace and stability we have now.
Don't take me literally when I say things like 'the UN stopped all war!'
You actually take such turns of phrase literally...
The rest of us don't. It's a fluid distinction.
If you need to take the time to press on it and then get the details worked out, so be it...
But you should pick up on such things right from the start...
Don't take me literally when I say things like 'the UN stopped all war!'
"Your yes should be yes and your no should be no"
If you have to use hyperbole to make your argument at least use it properly. Saying the UN ended war in Europe--or even made it peaceful as you said--shows a profound ignorance of European affairs in the last 65 years.
I'm sure that there are many who fell behind the Iron Curtain who would disagree with you about the "peacefulness" ensured by the USSR--whose importance in the UN was engineered by those "peacemakers" you reference.
Likewise there are the tragic families of the dead by separatist violence who have little faith in the UN's peacemaking capability.
The UN couldn't even stop an obvious monster like Milosevic except for bombing his country to the ground.
And if we leave Europe, well, you get lovely things like necklacing in South Africa and, well, everything the Khmer Rouge did.
Uhh, GM, you're the one who said that the UN was like, totally, all about warmaking.
Talk about hyperbole!
Fact of the matter is that the UN has helped keep us from WWIII.
It has also ensured a lot o' lasting peace in Western Europe.
Of course, it's at times feckless, and hasn't been able to stop all war or make all countries totally safe, and it definitely didn't do so right away.
But WWI and WWII want to talk with you for a bit...
The UN is about warmaking.
No hyperbole intended.
The term "the United Nations" predated the 1945 charter, by the way--it's the term the allies referred to themselves by when they were foaming at the mouth at their new abilities to bomb civilian targets (n.b. that was an ad that appeared in Time magazine, of all places).
The world's gotten more peaceful since the founding of the U.N., and that peacefulness has increased steadily since its inception.
So it goes.
G.M. Palmer you are exactly right. I am preparing for the GRE and some of the "true" answers on the analogies part that I'm studying are so ridiculous, that one can only come to the conclusion that they are the product of the test maker's personal experience and not objective, as any good test question should be. They should also remove this section from all academic placement tests.
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