Stewart Stremler wrote:
Hm. Then I wonder what the appeal was based on.
"If you have two triangular pyramids (four sides each) and join them such that one side of one is in full contact with one side of the other, how many faces are left exposed?"
Four sides each can be read as either "four sides other than the base" or "four sides including the base". If "four sides including the base", then sticking two faces together gives 6 exposed faces. If "four sides other than the base" then sticking two identical faces together gives 8 exposed faces.
However, unless somebody can quote *verbatim* the wording of the question, it really isn't worth considering as there are simply too many permutations.
This is one of the things which the SAT really gets correct with their "experimental" sections. They clean out the questions which are misleading to the better students.
I bumped into this a *lot* when I was preparing for the SAT. Whenever I took a sample test from J. Random Prep Book, I could never score more than about 1400. Never. When I took the SAT, I rather easily scored 1560.
The difference was that the SAT questions are *never* misleading. Hard questions are hard. Easy questions are easy. Everybody gets the easy questions. Only good students get the hard questions. Any hard question which easy students might get because of some random change correlation get thrown out after statistical testing identifies that in the question.
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