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I remember reading that book when I took a Sociology course, as part of the breadth requirement, at university.
It was fascinating, yet horrifying to see how the earliest IQ tests included questions like “What is Crisco?” and “Who is Babe Ruth?”, and were administered to immigrants who didn’t even know how to read or write. This is precisely what created the myth that “Polish people are all abnormally stupid”, which led to all those “dumb Polish” jokes.
Ultimately, what we learned in that class was that IQ is whatever the people who made the test decide IQ is. If they think that IQ is based on your knowledge of American culture (Crisco, Babe Ruth), then, obviously, people who have just gotten off the boat at Ellis Island have very low IQs. If they create a test that only measures math skills, then IQ is based only on math skills.
Besides, as so many of us have discovered, it’s not so much your IQ (Intelligence Quotient) that’s important, but your EQ (Emotional Quotient), which measures your ability to respond to emotional stimuli, and work with others. In other words, how you use what you’ve got.
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