h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As one of those who tried to get a bit of expansion on the cultural-bias of IQ tests, I thought I would mention that I found a very good example in a test I looked at, only last week. In fact it was published on a leading English newspapers website, which therefore appears to give the test credibility. The preamble to the test began:

The following IQ test was devised by professional IQ testers, [company name]. Three hundred people across the UK completed it in 10 minutes under test conditions and provided details of their salary and management levels. From this information, the [newspaper] has programmed the worlds first ever IQ/salary index

One of the questions included was:
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, ?, 17, 19

What number replaces the ?

The answer is in fact 13, as these are the first eight prime numbers.

Most educated people will have seen these during math lessons at school. So already this question comes down to:
a) whether you were educated, were interested in math enough to have taken note and can remember this series.
Or
b) You're damn intelligent and managed to work it out for yourself.

Although still an issue today imagine how much more divisive this would have been 50 or 60 years ago when education systems were split, or immigrants were entering the country having had a lower quality of education.

This is exactly the sort of thing that used to crop up in the early tests, along with questions relating to reading voltaire in the original language, and plato in the original greek. these sort of questions are called knowledge based questions,and do a very good job of testing your competence in a certain subject area. They are also essential for computer based training, but basically have the problem in intelligence test of assuming that highly educated and intelligence means the same thing. Unfortunately, although they are related (the more intelligent you are, the more highly educated you will be and also the higher the size of your vocabulary), people of lower intelligence who are interested in everything can score higher than geniuses who are not interested in the same areas as the test compiler.
I do intend to cover this in the set of entries, but found it to be better to set up something for the food to be thrown at prior to trying to get a comprehensive set of entries written.

A fisrt draft of entries are now waiting feedback over at the university project on http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A584525 where any help would be greatly received.

That should have been
A first draft of entries are now waiting feedback over at the university project on http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A584525 where any help would be greatly received.