Ultimate IQ Tests: 1000 Practice Test Questions to Boost Your Brainpower (Ultimate Series)

good

Very entertaining, keeps you busy, i love the tests. I'm happy with it.

Alright, does the job

product used to fight against the decaying mind of a 58 year old.

I've studied Psychology up to degree level and I'm a cryptic crossy addict, admittedly not the quickest though. This book is full of what I would rate as questions that get too challenging, too quickly. Obviously the easy stuff isn't a problem for most people, but I question very seriously, the percentage of average, unprimed people, who could even complete the first half of the first test. Some of the anagram based questions are pure evil and thats in the first half of the tests, when things are supposed to be ok for most test subjects.Question 22 on the first test has a typo error, 3 13/16 and not 3 3/16 as they've printed. I wondered why when I found a mathematical pattern, it didn't produce the answer they have listed at the back of the book. I've taken quite a few tests, mostly standardised and I would just love to see a sample of University students sit one of these tests.I guarantee that most would be dead in the water with the majority of the questions, especially when you consider the time factor. If I struggle with the hard ones, what kind of experience would a bright person have, who has no experience of anagrams, mathematical series or cultural meanings of highly academic English words. Please, show me the demographic that produced a mean of 100 with these test questions, the Mensa, special IQ test battalion, annual day out to Scarborough perhaps.Despite how unrealistically hard the questions are for average people, I do appreciate the book for its ability to stretch your thinking and to give you a multitude of new strategies, when seeing a question format, cold, for the first time.

I quite liked using this book but I would say less than 1/4 of the Qs offer any challenge. For the most part they can be answered fairly instantly if you have a good vocab and any idea how IQ tests work. It’s good practice if you are looking at taking an official IQ test just because of the sheer number of questions to practice however it annoys me that some of the answers are inaccurate. For example, if the clue is “small insect” don’t make your answer “mite” as that is an arachnid - this prevents people who actually know stuff like this from getting these points as I wouldn’t even consider using the word mite to describe a small insect. There are other examples through the book of this kind of error, another question gave small ape as a clue and monkey was the answer…urm no! I think there has also been one maths error in the answers so far and I’m only on test 5. But overall I am still glad I bought it as it is giving me some good practice.

Can't understand it

I am on the autistic spectrum, so I do struggle with converting instructional sentences into a logical series of steps. This is because my mind finds many ways to interpret the instructions, so I either find too many potential solution pathways, or I become puzzled over finding a way to disambiguate the instructions and find a mindset that allows me a probabilistic way to seek the answer that the examiner was looking for. I have not progressed far through this book as I suffered quite a lot of stress over finding alternative solutions, and not always being able to understand the overarching rationale for the answer from the supplied solutions. I am hoping that by pushing further through this book, I can learn to think more clearly as other people do and avoid finding those irritating anomalies or patterns that distract me away from the solution. I will give the book 4 stars for now, mostly on account of its girth and containing some very devious puzzles, but I'm not sure that I will ever overcome the clutter in my mind caused by a brain that incessantly seeks observations that don't actually matter, even if they are valid from other perspectives. I will try to gain some momentum from the ruse of optimism and see just how much I can understand from this book, before I declare that I am a dunce!