frog! dinosaur!

[jwgh]

Ken Jennings reports getting this question from reader Liz:

Recently my friend (a college grad) applied for a summer job with AAA where she would answer phones and help design maps for people who are taking road trips. As part of the application process she basically had to take a mini-SAT with word problems, math problems and analogies on it. One of the analogy questions has really been bugging us and we can’t figure out the answer. I was wondering if you could help us…

Frog : Dinosaur :: Whale :

a) cat
b) human
c) fish
d) bird

Comments

[cgoldfish.livejournal.com]

i'm going to go with FISH on that. that's my guess. i'm waiting for it to show up on the message boards though.

[jwgh]

I suspect that somewhere along the line some seemingly innocuous change has been made to the puzzle that makes it make no sense.

[cgoldfish.livejournal.com]

i figure someone'll just call AAA. or that *someone* on the message board works there and knows.

[cgoldfish.livejournal.com]

also - someone on the message boards said "take note of the appendages" - but while both whales and fish have flippers - i've never seen a dinosaur with one. well, except for the ones that turned into whales.

[jwgh]

Number of appendages, maybe?

[saucypunk.livejournal.com]

i would go with either cat or human, because whales being mammals seems like a good trick-question kind of thing.

other than that, though... man. i'd probably guess human, just because of less hair.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Man, that's a stupid analogy. But the answer is "fish". Frogs are amphibians that live on land, while dinosaurs were reptiles that lived on land*. Different category, same general environment.

Whales are mammals that live in water. By the analogy, we need to find a non-mammal that also lives in the water. Cats and humans are also mammals, so they don't fit. Birds aren't mammals, but they don't live in the water (mostly.) But fish live in the water and aren't mammals. So it's fish.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

* (forgot my footnote.) Yeah, there's a debate about the reptile thingie. And although most of the things living in the water in dinosaur times weren't classed as dinosaurs, I think there was at least one aquatic dinosaur. But the main point is, they aren't amphibians, and most of them lived in areas frogs could live in.

Are there any completely aquatic frogs?

[cgoldfish.livejournal.com]

re: aquatic frogs - yes.

[jwgh]

I thought that the distinction between frogs and toads was that frogs lived mostly in the water while toads lived mostly on the land, but the existence of tree frogs seems to indicate that I am completely wrong about that.

Anyway, apparently African dwarf frogs are completely aquatic.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I guess I should have said "aquatic" to begin with instead of "lives in water", because yeah, most frogs are in wet, damp places... except for that aquatic frog, which actually lives in the water.

of course there's always the standard multiple choice technique

[jwgh]

which is to ignore the question and look only at the answers.

The standard thing is to look for the answers that are, in some sense, 'close' to each other; one of them is probably right.

I was going to provide my own analysis here from that starting point, but I think it will be more fun to let other people do it.

(except I will say that my analysis of the answers leads me to believe that the correct answer is HUMAN.)

Re: of course there's always the standard multiple choice technique

[pompe.livejournal.com]

I'd go for human.

Old-style geological timekeepers liked to divide into four eras. Frogs - Paleozoic which was the "first", advanced-life-wise, dinos - typical of the second, Mesozoic age, whales turn up in the third era which then logically was called Tertiary, and in the Quarternary - fourth - era we have humans.

Re: of course there's always the standard multiple choice technique

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I would like to see a rewrite of Greek mythology and the Golden Age/Silver Age/Heroic Age/Current Age timeline of Hesiod, but using the frogs/dinos/whales/humans species progression.

Hercules was a WHALE!