Funny you should bring that up, I pondered the term "quotient" yesterday, and guessed it must be from latin "quot" (what? yes, "what?"). The mantra goes "divid

Funny you should bring that up, I pondered the term "quotient" yesterday, and guessed it must be from latin "quot" (what? yes, "what?"). The mantra goes "dividend / divisor = quotient". Sure you need to take the nominator into account, but where do you draw the line? On the one hand, the environmental factors are averaged because it would be hard to draw a line for each individual. On the other hand, the real kicker is to take two tests, and divide the two quotients, eliminating constant factors and only looking at the rate of improvement. Of course the assumption of constant environmental "divisors" is illusionary, only symbolic. "Quotient" is very fitting also because testing is trying to divide subjects into groups. "Divide" is also very fitting: "vide" ("see") is heavily linked to knowledge, ob-vi-ously (more strikingly in German: "offensichtlich"). In fact, language started out as sign language, and simply looking into a direction is used as a sign even by apes. I believe "to tell" also derives from that. So there is a strong connection between visual thinking and language ... and math: It's symbolic reasoning, even to tell derives from counting (as in "to recount a story", e.g.) -- "tell" and "talk", etc, ultimitely derive from * del (de-?), "speak" is similar to "spy" and "spect", this is really fundamental; Which brings me back to divide, "di-" is akin to "two". Learning is inherently about telling two things appart. For complex problems, talking up in terms of two is far too inefficient, though. E.g. we see three dimensions and so on and so forth. So, I guess IQ testing concerns the ability to coordinate X associations at once. It is not about head-nuts. Only, for higher X it will generally involve reading comprehension. And I can report that there is a sharp cut-off at some X for me. The time limit then is only set to a limit at which solving at all is increasingly unlikely. But, I guess the tests are biased to which coordination tasks are usually performed, ie. which capabilities can be expected. This will be tested in the beginning of a test as control. So, those tests are engineered to test intelligence in combination with specific domain skills, which are expected prerequisit in specific domains. That is circular rsasoning, yes, circjlar reasoning is fundamental, because ... counting is based on the two modulo ring (that satisfies the me, at least, although of course there's much more to it).