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" is all that plausible
Why not?
It would be a pretty bad test of physical intuition of the sort you describe, but a pretty good test of spatial reasoning, and I assume that the army people are competent at designing tests. If it was a test of physical intuition, why change how the objects were attached to each other in each answer? And so on and so forth.
Note: If you asked me "why would they change the relative positions in each answer if it was a test of assembling objects?" I would say "Because changing things around increases the need for spatial reasoning."
Your link doesn't specifically support that.
I thought the evidence was strong enough to say that pretty confidently, but you're right it's not overwhelming.
Additional note: if you look at the page Unnamed linked to, you'll see that the picture is all one piece, and the instructions are down below in text. If the question we got this picture from was similar, that may explain the disappearing instructions!
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
Yes, that's exactly what I was doing, openly and unashamedly. Recall that I had no idea what the question was until informed that it was a military exam. That information made A a more plausible answer than it would otherwise have been, for the reasons I explained.
I was proposing my best guess at the answer to the question "why is A the correct answer?" As such, my comments were not intended to strongly dispute the idea that there might be a better answer. (P(X|Y) vs P(Y|X) and all that, you know.)
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?