What’s funny about this test is one of the questions was something like “Being literal in language brings clarity” and I agreed and thought that was common sense.
If I applied that to this test, then the common sense statements might be more like:
“You should be careful when picking roses, because they have thorns”
“Beautiful things often have flaws”
“There is usually a downside to good things”
“Watching a pot of water does not make it boil faster”
Then all of the sudden, we’d all have common sense and all agree on it. Phrasing drastically changes the results of this test, and it makes me wonder about the validity of their design.
I also thought every answer was “something I have learned.” Isn’t that true of all knowledge, including common sense? I didn’t pop out of my mother’s womb thinking that every rose has thorns or knowing how to boil water.
So is this test really testing common sense, or is it testing how literally I interpret language when taking a test? It doesn’t even test if I understand idioms. I have used the phrase “A watched pot never boils” in casual conversation recently, to convey to someone that monitoring something wouldn’t make it move faster, and we both understood what I meant. What did we prove? That we had a shared understanding of language and the meaning of an idiom, but not whether or not we had enough common sense to look both ways before crossing the street, or to shut our windows when it’s raining.
