Here is a part of stunning or mental questions at Google Inc. job interview. How many questions can you answer? Are you still interested in work at Google?
1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
2. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
3. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
4. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
5. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
6. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
7. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?
8. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
9. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when
a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
10. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. if they have a girl, they have another child. if they have a boy, they stop. what is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
11. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?
12. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)
13. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?
14. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?
15. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
16. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
17. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)
Questions source from Tihomir.
Man, that’s crazy. These are non-related to the jobs directly and imagine what’d they ask regarding the kind of job you’re applying for. It’s like busting your b***s with a hammer or something.
I won’t be applying to Google anytime soon.
Google should introduce me to their drug dealer …
Is it a IQ test?
Here’s my answers, or rather here’s the correct answers:
Tag them now that we use tags folksonomy.
1) Tell me how many you want in there and I’ll do it.
2) Wake up from my dream and start working.
3) Nothing – the daily rain will clean it.
7) Use Google / Google Maps.
9) Two men die i) the one the queen saw ii) the King when the first man’s wife reveals that the King has cheated on her
14) No because my bday is on Feb 29th (it’s not but a little white lie wouldn’t hurt)
15) 6 billion (population of the world), not all of them are qualified
12) 7.5 degrees – the small hand is 1/4 of the way between 3 & 4.
Each minute = 360/60 = 6 degrees
Each 5 minutes = 6 * 5 = 30 degrees
1/4 of the way between 3 & 4 = 30 / 4 = 7.5 degrees
16) Put three balls on each side.
If not balanced
— keep the three balls that tip the scale – throw the other 3 away
else
— throw these 6 balls away
Balance 2 of the 3 remaining balls
If balanced
+++ throw these two balls away – the remaining ball is the heavy one
else
+++ the ball that tips the scale is the heavy one
12) 7.5 degrees – the small hand is 1/4 of the way between 3 & 4.
Each minute = 360/60 = 6 degrees
Each 5 minutes = 6 * 5 = 30 degrees
1/4 of the way between 3 & 4 = 30 / 4 = 7.5 degrees
Incorect.
While it goes 7.5 clock moves a little bit more
Ha, ha. That’s fucking great. I love that. I’ll admit- a few of them are so off the wall that I don’t get it. But I can definately find the relevance in quite a few of them, if I look for it. Almost all of them seem silly at first glance…
8. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
That’s probably the most obvious of them all.
I would love to work for Google. But if that were ever to become a reality, my skills (or lack thereof, rather) in all types of mathematics and related fields would require an overwhelming amount of improvement.
10) The expected number of girls is the same as the number of boys if you assume that the probability of having a boy or a girl is the same. The number of boys is the same as the number of families after infinite amount of time and the number of girls is a random variable with expected value of one per family.