A swim coach told me that in 1950s people used to do the first lap of breaststroke underwater but people kept passing out. It wasn't safe for youth sports.
Trees are great but Las Vegas is in a desert. It would better to also build for shade, like old hilltop towns in Italy or Spain, or various urban designs in the Middle East.
Practice will clearly improve your performance on puzzle questions like these. Is that really testing intelligence, or just interest and motivation for solving puzzles?
It's also testing for social class, educational quality, and attention span. While mostly validating existing hierarchies. And giving loads of people a reason to feel good about themselves.
Don't forget the very real and horrifying links with eugenics and the use of IQ testing to justify sterilisation and worse! It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Not just that. Some IQ test puzzles that were difficult to understand when I encountered them "in the wild" went from bizarre to somewhere between trivial to doable when I read an explanation online of what they were even asking. My measured IQ would have taken quite a jump on just that one bit of information, were I taking those tests.
Without sarcasm or rancor, you can profitably debate whether or not that means that those questions were just too hard and I really was indicating that I wasn't smart enough for them. I get that, and my point isn't about my intelligence or if it is measured properly; whatever it is, it is, and you are welcome to conclude that I'm just a dufus, especially if you get them without that hint. My point is more that if the tests are supposed to be good measures of whatever intelligence is, it is rather debatable whether they should have that characteristic.
I do know I have never liked the "find the next number" tests; even before I learned about polynomial interpolation in school my protest has always been that any series of any numbers can be a pattern; there are an infinite number of patterns, and even constraining them down to the "human interesting" patterns isn't enough to nail down the patterns the IQ test writer is actually using. As a passing part of this post [1] I show a number of patterns in the OEIS that start with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and do not proceed to 32, each of which does not proceed to 32 with a different number, and I just stopped looking after I had enough for a blog post and already was filtering the results to "things you might actually recognize", and I probably could have kept going for a while. (Yes, I'm aware that a normal IQ test won't be looking for "divisors of 496" at the beginning parts... but towards the end of a high-IQ test...?) Just realizing that they tend to confine themselves to varying levels of Newton's calculus [2] is enough to unstick me, and, again, bump my score just because I know something rather than because of "intelligence".
(This also implies that the SAT proxy measure, even though it is not a direct IQ measurement, is likely to be more satisfactory, in the cases where the test takers have the relevant mathematical knowledge in advance. The SAT did not involve any problems that I had not encountered before, and to the extent that I passed and failed the various questions it can not be said it was due to lack of knowledge of what the questions even properly were on my part.)
