Are you clever
The Oxbridge undergraduate interviews are notorious for their technique of assessing candidates, professors, of course, tell just how smart you are.
John Farndon’s book is a collection of 75 of the most drilling questions taken from actual admission interviews and gives full answers to all variety of question on histories, philosophies, sciences and arts. First of all this book should be liked by everyone who likes to think they are clever. Cleverness is not only knowledge but also lateral thinking. Try answering how you could market a rock band, if a thermostat can think (psychology), If Shakespeare was a rebel and how his “Midsummer’s Night Dream relates to geography.
Do you have the technique of looking at a problem or question in all possible ways – for example, in the questions on statues, appreciate that the word “move” has other meanings apart from the obvious one.
John Farndon, a graduate of Cambridge himself, author, poet, composer, attempts at possible responses from Oxbridge questions and some people think these questions are just weird and pretentious and are designed to entrap and frighten off any young students foolhardy enough to apply for privileged pinnacles of learning.
The brilliant thing about this book is : they make you THINK, aggravatingly and provocatively and they set your mind racing. John Farndon stressing that this makes them interesting for everyone.
He warns against taking his own responses as “definitive or even model answers”, and he was sure that “some interviewers would shake their heads in disappointment and turn me down flat”. He assumes academic knowledge beyond that which most intelligent readers will normally have.
Education has so much become a means to an end -passing exams, getting jobs- that we seem to have lost sight of its significant means, of learning to think more widely, of using knowledge beyond the narrow confines of the syllabus.
The author promises to offer “outside-the-box” ways of thinking about Oxbridge interview questions such as “what happens when I drop an ant” or “if there was an omnipotent God, would he able to create a stone that he could not lift? “How many times you would have to fold a paper for it to reach the moon.” This book certainly will provoke your thoughts and create a debate in your mind.
The brightest and the motivated candidates are tested by the grueling face-to-face interviews, which take place in December. The perplexing questions are designed to offer an insight into a candidates logic grey cells and problem-solving skills.
So You THINK you’re CLEVER? : Taking on the Oxford and Cambridge Interview Questions John Farndon £12.99