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by giantg2 552 days ago
You'd have to be on disability to not understand the sort of questions like this. Those disability numbers, especially from covid, should be available.

“Crackers seem soft when their moisture level reaches about 9 percent.” The sample “low difficulty” question asks, “At what moisture level do crackers become soft?”
2 comments
lesuorac 552 days ago
Crackers also seem soft when their moisture level reaches about 5 percent.

What moisture level do crackers become soft?

I'm sorry, 5 percent isn't the correct answer; they actually get soft earlier than then.

This seems like one of those questions like "what's the difference between an abstract class and an interface in Java" where you're looking what the expected answer is as opposed to the actual answer. (w.r.t. Java; the answer they're looking for is that you can define a default method in an abstract class. It doesn't matter how long ago you could do that in an interface ...)

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giantg2 552 days ago
What you are missing is the part about following directions. The literacy tests will instruct you to use the provided information to answer the questions. It doesn't matter if the information is incorrect. In fact, it may be beneficial to have incorrect information to eliminate people using preexisting knowledge vs comprehending the provided text.
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Gigachad 552 days ago
I guess you’d fail the reading comprehension part then. All the required info is in the question. You can’t just pull 5% from nowhere. There is an assertion that it’s 9%, the task is to identify and repeat the asserted value, not make up your own.
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hyperbrainer 552 days ago
But the text says "seems", not that it actually "becomes" soft at 9%. Depending on your view of language, whether the answer is there changes.
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Gigachad 552 days ago
“Seems” here being “you experience it as soft” since soft isn’t an absolute thing. Since there are no other mentions of percentages that are soft there isn’t really anything else to mix it up with.
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lesuorac 551 days ago
That line of thinking breaks down in the real world though.

Its like when some scientist reports they killed 70% of cancer cells in the lab and a news report comes out with scientists develop treatment for 70% of cancer.

You cannot just take "scientist reports they killed 70% of cancer cells in the lab" and then follow-up with a question of "what percent of cancer did the scientist cure?" and then use the only percentage you saw ("70%") as the answer. The information given wasn't not sufficient to answer the question asked; in a test scenario, sure make an assumption but in the real world just get clarification ...

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lesuorac 552 days ago
> All the required info is in the question.

I mean it's not though. The question is about "is soft" not "seems soft".

These slight of hands are pretty crucial to actually reading in the real world (or conversely, deceiving people).

It's like if you read a press release about how X is 120% better than Y. Judging from the press release, X is clearly better than Y but then if you actually do your own research you find for your workload X is actually 10% worse than Y.

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RGamma 552 days ago
"Reaches" ought to imply the lower threshold for softness. Of course, softness itself is not a crisp predicate.
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dwaltrip 552 days ago
Ok so why did the scores change?
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