Literature

What Is Intelligence, anyway?

By Isaac Asimov
 
What is news, anyway?  When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had invariably seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didnt mean anything. The next twenty-four hour period I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.) All my life Ive been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that Im highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too. Actually, though, dont such(prenominal) scores simply mean that I am actually good at answering the type of academic questions that ar considered worthy of answers by people who make up the lore tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?
For instance, I had an auto-repair earthly concern once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored to a greater extent than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was furthermost more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were portend oracles - and he always fixed my car.



Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, Id record myself a moron, and Id be a moron, too. In a valet where I could not use my academic training and my vocal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a turn of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the liberalization as an arbiter of such matters. Consider my auto-repair man, again.  He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me.  One age he raised...If you want to get a full essay, recount it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com



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