Why assume...? Why ignore...? Why not think...?
I don't know! Lord knows, I didn't design the test, and the burden certainly isn't on me to explain it. All I did was explain my best guess about what the question was. You don't have to agree. But I could ask an a similar sequence of questions in response to whatever interpretation you might propose -- as indeed, either of us could do in response to whatever the "correct" interpretation is (if it's something different).
I don't think "it's probably supposed to be a test of physical intuition" is all that plausible
Why not? It's a military exam, for goodness' sake. Intuition about how mechanical objects act under the influence of gravity seems to me like a perfectly natural thing for the military to be interested in testing.
So I just googled, and it looks like I'm right. It seems to fall into the "assembling objects" category.
Your link doesn't specifically support that. Maybe you meant to link somewhere where that particular question was specifically classified as falling into that category? If not -- if you were just making an assumption to this effect -- then I could equally well put it under "mechanical comprehension".
But even if it's actually in the "assembling objects" category, how does that refute my interpretation? "What happens when you put these two things together?" sounds like a perfectly good "assembling objects" question to me.
(And surely "assembling objects" requires some "mechanical comprehension" in any case?)
The question is awful. In no way should my revelation of the particular interpretation that happened to suggest itself to me be construed as an endorsement of the reasonableness of this question or any other part of the test.
But I could ask an a similar sequence of questions in response to whatever interpretation you might propose.
Agreed. But I asked those questions not because I think your reasoning was inherently wrong, but because I felt like you were making a post-hoc story to justify specifically the answer A. While some sort of problem-solving logic that happens to generate A provides fairly easy answers for those kinds of questions, generating A post-hoc does not help answer them.
...I don't think "it's probably supposed to be a test of physical intuition"
I was linked to this on another forum. No instructions were given, apparently - just this picture. What's the deal?
It seems to me the answer is clearly C, not A as the test indicates; and the members in the original thread appear to agree. However, attempted justifications of A have been made, none of which are very convincing to me - mainly because if there are no instructions and an obvious answer, there's not really any benefit for them to reward a different interpretation, which would almost certainly involve arbitrary assumptions regarding the rules they really want you to apply.
Trick questions on exams seem to rely on failure to pay close attention to instructions, or insufficiently rigorously apply rules; when there are no instructions, what justification would anyone have for not choosing the most obvious interpretation? Any could be right!
What do the geniuses here at MoreRight think?