Mensa Challenge

Jesse has a Mensa a day calendar. And yesterday he shared the challenge with the House of Rock inhabitants. Both he and I figured it out reasonably quickly, which if you know us well enough you can take as a hint.

The question: What do these four words have in common? It has nothing to do with number of consonants or vowels.

MORE
PAIRS
AVENGE
MISER

Once you get it, you’ll be 100% sure of it.

WARNING: the answer is in the comments.

13 thoughts on “Mensa Challenge

  • 5/12/2006 at 9:27 am
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    I know.
    Took maybe 5 seconds, though I’m fairly up-to-speed on my MENSA puzzles from American Way magazine.

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  • 5/12/2006 at 9:41 am
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    Here’s another one for you Sander. What do these four words have in common?

    Sander
    Fat
    Corpulent
    Obesity

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  • 5/12/2006 at 9:53 am
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    I confess it took me 30 seconds or so.

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  • 5/12/2006 at 10:08 am
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    I totally got it in

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  • 5/12/2006 at 12:43 pm
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    Flippin’ bag nab it!

    I can find Burkina Faso on a map, but I can’t do this.

    I *thought* I had it (and smiled because it had to do with geography). The first one is Rome, and then Paris, and then Geneva. But then I was stuck with “miser”

    Sierm? Miers? Serim? Mirse? Rimse? Isrem?

    I must be barking up the wrong tree.

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  • 5/12/2006 at 12:50 pm
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    Close Patrick. The last one is Reims. It’s a city in the northern part of france.

    I would have thought as a geography guy you’d have known that?

    oooh… academic ZING!

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  • 5/12/2006 at 1:24 pm
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    Touché, Mike D. Now how is it that you know about some medium-sized French city, yet you can’t pin the tail on Bolivia? (or 70% of Africa?)

    Sure, Reims is a city, but it is not in the same class as the other 3.
    Paris: largest city in France + capital city
    Rome: 3rd largest city in Italy + capital city
    Geneva: 2nd largest city in Switzerland + famous for Geneva Convention, etc.

    According to Wikipedia, Reims isn’t even in the top 15 in size of French metropolitan areas. I mean, come on.

    If I were Mensa (and obviously I’m not, since I’d never heard of Reims), I’d have replaced “miser” with “solo”.

    Not only is “solo” representative of a much more obvious city, it might throw people because you’d have both “solo” and “pairs” in the same list.

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  • 5/12/2006 at 1:36 pm
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    Oh man. If Patrick was a superhero, he would be Captain Geography, and he would battle the evil Dr Cartographer while hunting down and destroying geographical inaccuracies everywhere.

    TO THE MAP-MOBILE!

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  • 5/12/2006 at 1:41 pm
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    PS – We need a super-hero-themed MS Paint challenge. Maybe “turn a blogger into a superhero”?

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  • 5/12/2006 at 1:52 pm
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    If it makes you feel better Patrick, I guessed that it was Remis not Reims. And assumed that, if there’s an Italian city named after Romulus (Rome) that perhaps there is another city named after his brother Remus. Although I was wrong regarding the City as you were, the game was actually just to identify the common link, which could certainly be done with three of the four words.

    The whole purpose of the “name the country” game event is because I’m slowly building up my MSPaint map reserves so that eventually I’ll be able to do a “where have you been?” game that encompasses the whole world instead of just the US. Then we’ll see who’s done the most worldly traveling. Unfortunately, I’m still 4 and a half continents short. I’ll get there eventually.

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  • 5/12/2006 at 5:21 pm
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    Awesome. I fully support any and all endeavours that let me proclaim “HEY LOOK HOW MANY COUNTRIES I’VE BEEN TO!!”

    Heh.

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  • 5/15/2006 at 12:01 pm
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    Oh, a where have you been game sounds fun. I’m guessing that Roland would do pretty well at that. I have a quite a few European countries under my belt, but I’d feel guilty claiming them as they were almost all when I was 4 years old.

    Your South America map actually inspired me to pursue an international trip sometime in 2007. Here’s the roundabout way:

    1) You made a map that included the Falkland Islands, somewhere I don’t know a whole lot about.

    2) I went to Wikipedia to look up the capital city, and I saw some photos. I went to a few other websites with photos of the Falkland Islands.

    3) One of those websites also had pictures of Easter Island, a place I’ve always been fascinated with.

    4) As I researched Easter Island, I found a lot of information regarding Chile, especially southern Chile and Patagonia and stuff.

    5) After all of that, I’ve decided that I’d like to visit Chile and make a road/train trip from Santiago down to Punta Arenas, with maybe a side trip to Easter Island.
    Hopefully, I can pull this off in fall of ’07.

    Thanks, dude!

    Reply

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