[Genius if you can solve it?] Insight and intuition: a challenging IQ quiz

strawberry

This is a kanji puzzle: with the grass radical on top and “mother” underneath, you get the character for strawberry (苺). Strawberries are often written in katakana, so it probably didn’t come to mind right away. Using the same idea, characters like “plum” (梅) and “peach” (桃) could make for quiz questions too.

41

The numbers represent the number of squares in each kanji. For Iwate, “岩” has 1 and “手” has 0. This time we’re picking prefectures whose names include kanji with squares, but for Yamanashi or Tochigi it would be “00.”

23

It’s a pattern where the number being added increases by 1 each time. Add 2 to 3 to get 5, add 3 to 5 to get 8, add 4 to 8 to get 12, and add 5 to 12 to get 17. Next, add 6 to 17, so the answer is 23.

stewed offal (motsu nikomi)

Because a man has two testicles, if you extract the words “hold,” “two,” and “balls/fruit” (motsu, ni, mi), you get motsu-nikomi (stewed offal). The key is to pick out and connect words from the problem statement that seem like hints. Also, imagining from the dish can help ideas come to mind more easily.

wagashi (traditional Japanese confectionery)

Since when you eat wagashi (traditional Japanese sweets), the “wa” becomes “shi,” it turns into “washi,” and then “shishi.” Because “shishi” can mean “lion,” the key is whether you can infer the answer from that. It’s a question that tests your reasoning and creativity.

tofu

Because the word “fu” is written ten times, the ten “fu”s form the word tōfu (tofu). It’s a quiz where the continuous string of hiragana provides a hint through the number of characters to derive the answer.