Customer Reviews

The Mensa Genius Quiz-a-day Book

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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"The Mensa Genius Quiz-A-Day Book" contains 366 puzzles (including one for leap years). The puzzles cover a wide variety including cryptograms, picture puzzles, math puzzles, riddles, palindromes, Tom Swifties, and more. The book is divided into months and at the start of each month there is a description of how the month got its name and some other interesting facts about the month. The answers are at the back of the book and each answer tells what percentage of Mensa members got the right answer for that particular puzzle.

"The Mensa Genius Quiz-A-Day Book" is a good book for people who want to keep their mind active by doing at least one puzzle a day. The puzzles are varied in such a way that if you find a puzzle tough one day, the puzzle the next day won't seem as hard. My favorite puzzles are the word puzzles (palindromes, anagrams, riddles, mini-mysteries, etc.) while I'm not too fond of or particularly good at the math puzzles. For the most part, the book is evenly divided between the types of puzzles, but there are a few times when it seems like there are several of the same type of puzzle in a row. Although the book says Mensa, you don't have to be a Mensa member to do the puzzles (I'm not). The answer section gives a detailed explanation of each answer, which ultimately helps you solve similar types of puzzles. By the end of the book you should be able to solve or at least have an understanding of how each puzzle works.

"The Mensa Genius Quiz-A-Day Book" is hours of challenging fun for everyone.

This is a little book filled with puzzles. The majority of them are vocabulary-related puzzles that involve unscrambling letters. Some of them are math-related puzzles that involve pre-algebra. Some are logic puzzles.

There is a puzzle for every day of the year, and answers in the back. The answers include a % of Mensa "testers" that were able to answer the questions.

I keep it in the bathroom. Most of these puzzles are a little too easy. With a pencil and paper, most of them would be achievable for a bright sixth grader. An adult who is interested in puzzles will complete the majority of these puzzles in their head in a few seconds. This is probably because the book is quite old, and most of these puzzle ideas have been taught in school for a while, now, so... the "puzzle" part is stale.

This is a very fun book for those who can't get enough of logic puzzles. There is a wide variety of puzzles in this book. Buy this book and you too can look forward to solving a puzzle a day!

Book of 366 puzzles (one for every day of the year), including:
- find a palindrome to match a clue
- math logic puzzles (if 'x+y'=4 and 'y'=2', how much is 'x'?)
- word logic puzzles (which word can be added to the following words to make valid compound words)
- 'interletter' puzzles - find the words that are contained within a block of letters
- find words with specific meanings containing specific letters
- create word2 from word1, changing one letter at a time

I was impressed with the quality and variety of the puzzles. As you go through the book, you become familiar with the various types of puzzles, and they become easier.

And I especially enjoyed how the answers indicate the percentage of Mensans that got the answer correct. Made me feel smart when I got a tough one right!

Kindle-specific comments:
- My experience would have been *much improved* if each puzzle linked directly to its answer. Puzzles are in calendar order, and answers are in the back of the book, ordered by days of the month (1st of Jan, 1st of Feb, ... 2nd of Jan, 2nd of Feb, ...). To look up an answer, you have to jump to the back of the book, but it's difficult to know exactly where to jump, and so I ended up paging forward and back to find the answer I was looking for. I find paging back and forth more difficult on the Kindle than with a paperback, so this was very frustrating for me.
- Many puzzles were spread across multiple pages. It would have been much easier if the entire puzzle were on one page instead of breaking it apart.

All told, I would recommend the paperback version of this book.

My husband and I got this book to do together. We enjoy solving the quizzes and finding out the percentage of Mensans who got them correct. We gave it 4 stars because we think there are too many word puzzles. We were hoping for more number puzzles.

I bought this book prior to my taking the aptitude test that got me into Mensa. It was both fun and helpful and I at least felt a little smarter coming out the other end. I would recommend this book to anyone contemplating taking any similar test or just for a fun and challenging read. I sent this and a couple of other Mensa books to my niece and nephew. It went over pretty good with everyone in the family.

My wife loved this book I got for her. She's a mind game fanatic. Great condition, good quality. I would buy from them again.

I have purchased several of the Mensa books. There is a challenge to outwit the Mensa and I offer it to my friends on occasion in the form of a game.

I've belonged to a couple of high-IQ societies, including Mensa, in the past, and once talked to Dr. Salny over the phone about IQ equivalents for the MAT, or Miller Analogies test, which was the one I qualified on for Mensa. Dr. Salny, who was at the University of New Jersey at Rutgers the time, was very helpful in that regard and I wanted to mention that.

This is a great collection of puzzles put together by Dr. Salny to help you keep your mental muscles tuned up, whether you're a Mensa member or not. In fact, one of the things we've learned about the brain over the last 50 years is that in many ways the brain is truly like a muscle--use it or lose it.

I was a grad student in the brain sciences and also formally studied the IQ and psychometrics area for a while, and I had some comments about the problems with testing high IQs that I thought I'd post here, especially on the problem of testing very high IQs above 150 or 160, particularly for adults.

Various writers, researchers, and members of other high IQ societies have attempted to solve this problem by constructing their own tests and standardizing them. They also claim to be able to standardize these high-end IQ tests using various special procedures and statistics. However, the problem of standardization for these sorts of tests has really never been resolved very well. Hence, many claims of IQ's that high are really just that--claims. That isn't to say that people who score high on things like the Mega test or the Langdon LAIT and so on might not have IQ's of 180, just the reliability and accuracy of such scores isn't that great.

The other problem is that the human brain is quite complex and we really don't know how to adequately test its capabilities except in the crudest sense. Most IQ tests examine a half dozen factors at most (although the well-known DAT, the Differential Aptitude Test, looked at 9 factors, but then it was technically an aptitude test and not an IQ test) and there are actually dozens or perhaps hundreds of factors involved. The eminent cognitive psychologist and psychometrician, J.P Guilford's Structure of Intellect model postulated 120 different types of intelligence (most if not all of which I find more convincing than the more standard factor models).

Another problem is the factor subtests still correlate highly with each other; for example, the typical verbal subtest correlates at the .75 level with the math subtest, although the spatial ability tests seem purer. A .75 "r" or correlation means that half the variance in one test is accounted for by the variance of the other (since the variance is the correlation coefficient squared). Hence, the factor subtests aren't very "pure," as they say, and correlate too highly with verbal skills which is too narrow a subset of skills and also is likely the most socio-economically influenced.

That having been said, ironically, the most egregious criticism of IQ tests is that you can show that the most complex IQ test known is only about 10-15% more accurate in predicting, say, college grades, than a 40 item, 20-30 minute vocabulary test.

And finally, for the coup de grace, the most famous IQ study of all time, the Lewis Terman study at Stanford in the last century, tested tens of thousands of kids and then followed 1400 of them with IQ's of 140 and over throughout their lives. A couple of dozen were as high as 180. Although a distinguished group in later life in that many of their achievements were impressive, there were no Nobel Laureates in the group. In fact, they passed over two of them--Luis Alvarez and William Shockley--who didn't test high enough to be included, both of whom later won the Nobel Prize in physics. Oops.

The second coup de grace is that research has shown that further IQ points above 120 is not as important as good social intelligence in ensuring success in life. And an IQ of 120 is enough to do anything--with few exceptions-- such as being a physicist or mathematician. After all, James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA helix and Nobel Laureate, only had an IQ of 118. And in another classic study by Getzels and Jackson, children who were high on tests of creativity with average IQs of 120 had grades as high as those less creative with average IQs of 140.

Another thing you can see right away from visiting a few of these high-IQ society web pages and reading the discussions there, is that many of these people (most of them are men) are obsessed with the IQ business and about which test is the best, who has the highest IQ, and who gets to belong to the most exclusive societies. This produced an odd competitive race as various people attempted to form ever more rarified and exclusive and cliquish groups. There have been literally dozens of these, but most have never gone anywhere and died out after a few years, or never even got off the ground.

They also get into various inter-society and internecine debates, as I said, about who gets to belong to which high-IQ society on the basis of which test, each one claiming their test is the best, when, as I said, there really isn't any way to validate them that accurately. They've even gone, in one case, to the trouble of suing each other about the issue of the legitimacy of the testings, since few of these people are licensed psychologists. It really is a tempest in a teapot and they should go get a life. The whole thing would be funny were it not for the fact that they take the whole thing so seriously.

Of course, to some extent this is the pot calling the kettle black since I have belonged to a couple of these societies too in the past, but I also see the silliness of it all, not to mention, as I said, that it seems that for the vast majority of these people this is the only real distinction they seem to have.

"A quiz a day keeps the friends away!" quip the editors in their light-hearted introduction. This book from the MENSA organization has everything the budding ego-masseur/masseuse needs. Fantastic.