An extensive and useful survey of a wide array of complex test problems.
Kalogiannidis, a mechanical engineer with wide-ranging corporateexperience, offers tips and hacks for dealing with corporate inductive reasoning tests.
The author begins his book by warning readers that many top companies, including Audi, Scania, and Mercedes-Benz, have added standardized inductive reasoning quizzes to the battery of challenges they present to prospective new hires. Many applicants face these tests completely unprepared. Kalogiannidis, who says that he’s “completed, with astonishing results, multiple online psychometric evaluations,” provides many sample tests and an array of what he calls “foolproof” strategies that are designed to guarantee excellent performance: “Inductive reasoning tests are often perceived as measures of one’s IQ, which is partially true,” he reveals. “However, the real purpose of the test is to evaluate one's ability to perform complex tasks under high-stress conditions.” These tasks often involve sequences of shapes in various patterns—changing positions, amounts, or colors, for example, as they proceed—and test-takers must predict the next image in the sequence. The puzzles are created by using algorithms that steadily adapt to the test-taker’s level of skill. This can, of course, be intimidating for prospective new hires, particularly those who’ve never encountered psychometric tests before; in response to this, Kalogiannidis fills his pages with numerous full-color examples in which the author presents the problems, and then walks readers through the key visual elements in order to reveal solutions: “As you can observe, in each new frame, a new triangle is added to the existing structure in each row. Most accurately, the triangle is added in the clockwise direction.”
This illustrated guidebook’s comprehensive detail is impressive throughout. Kalogiannidis not only supplies endless variations, but also effectively uses words and images to focus the reader’s attention on specific pathways to each answer. At first glance, many of the tests will seem bewildering, without any obvious solution. This book’s approach is geared to disarm that first reaction and to acquaint readers with the nuances of the patterns at work. Some of the author’s advice will be familiar to anyone who’s taken a standardized test before: Don’t let anxiety hamper performance, and don’t waste valuable time on tougher sections at the cost of easier ones that can be completed more readily, and so on. However, Kalogiannidis also excels at offering reassurance with pragmatic tips that rethink test-taking in general, as when he encouraging readers to imaginatively “brainstorm” a solution instead of approaching it with preconceived notions—one of many moments when he quietly and confidently offers hope in order to quell anxiety. The author’s most basic advice is to mentally pull apart the patterns into components, so that one can conquer them by understanding the smaller details; when tackling a “rather complex” pattern, he advises readers to “apply a commonly used engineering practice: independently observe and study each entity within the frames.” Prospective test-takers will appreciate the learning experience, and they’ll feel significantly calmed by the notion that these tests can indeed be overcome.
An extensive and useful survey of a wide array of complex test problems.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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