[godelski]

  > Are you good at answering questions you are not trained to answer?

Yes. Most schooling is designed around this.

Pick a random math textbook. Any will do. Read a chapter. Then move to the homework problems. The typical fashion is that the first few problems are quite similar to the examples in the chapter. Often solvable by substitution and repetition. Middle problems generally require a bit of extrapolation. To connect concepts from previous chapters or courses in ways that likely were not explicitly discussed. This has many forms and frequently includes taking the abstract form to practical (i.e. a word problem). Challenge problems are those that require you to extrapolate the information into new domains. Requiring the connection of many ideas and having to filter information for what is useful and not.

  > How about a middle school test in a language you don’t speak?

A language course often makes this explicitly clear. You are trained to learn the rules of the language. Conjugation is a good example. By learning the structure you can hear new words that you've never heard before and extract information about it even if not exactly. There's a reason you don't just learn vocabulary. It's also assumed that by learning vocabulary you'll naturally learn rules.

Language is a great example in general. We constantly invent new words. It really is not uncommon for someone you know to be be talking to you and in that discussion drop a word they made up on the spot or just make a sound or a gesture. An entirely novel thing yet you will likely understand. Often this is zero-shot (sometimes it might just appear to be zero-shot but actually isn't)