Researchers asked 179 Canadian college students to answer the following three math questions:
1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? ____cents
2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? _____minutes
3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? _____days
From Relatively Interesting:
After completing the quiz, the students were asked about their innate religiosity, religious beliefs, and beliefs in supernatural entities (like God, angels, and Satan).
The results?
The more religious the students were, the less likely they were to have demonstrated effective analytical reasoning on the three questions. Conversely, the better the students did on the questions, the less likely they were to have strong beliefs.
Religious people tended to give the intuitive answers to the questions, and non-religious people gave the analytic answers.
Most of the theists I know would be able to correctly answer these questions. Math puzzle inventor Martin Gardner was a theist and would have been able to answer these questions in an instant.
