Test How Rare Your Common Sense Actually Is

Two of these questions have proper answers worth keeping

The melting-ice question is Archimedes at work. A floating cube displaces a volume of water whose weight equals its own, and when it melts it yields precisely that weight of water, so the level in the glass stays where it was. Rising seas come from land-based glaciers and ice sheets, plus the thermal expansion of warming water, rather than from floating sea ice.

The grease fire question is the one worth carrying out of here. Water thrown into burning oil flashes to steam in an instant and hurls flaming oil across the room. Smother it instead: cut the heat, slide a metal lid or a baking tray over the pan, and leave it covered until everything is cool. Fire services repeat that advice every year for good reason. And 350F is about 177C, which is why British recipes round it to 180.

Common sense is knowledge, not a faculty

The phrase implies a single quality some people have and others lack. What it usually describes is a pile of practical knowledge picked up by living, close to what Robert Sternberg called practical intelligence: tacit, acquired on the job, rarely taught directly. Someone who has cooked for twenty years knows the lid trick. Someone who has not simply has not met it yet, and that is a gap in experience rather than in wits.

Answers also look inevitable once you have heard them. Hindsight bias makes a fresh fact feel like something you always knew, which is why quizzes of this shape feel easy watching over a friend's shoulder and harder when you are alone with them. It also makes other people's slips look sillier than they were.

So the score is a snapshot of a handful of facts on one particular afternoon. It does not measure intelligence, common sense is not a construct with a validated scale attached to it, and the word rare in the title is flavour rather than a statistic anyone calculated. Missing one is an invitation to learn the answer, which you now have.