This week saw record losses in the US stock markets.  The DOW Industrials closed on Friday at below 9,000 points, its lowest level in four years.  Investor confidence is near an all-time low.  The housing market, gas and food prices, and many other industries seem to ever more volatile than before.  What about your job?

If you are in the construction, mortgage, or transportation industries most likely you have already felt the effects of a tightening economy.  Perhaps you even lost your job or are one of the lucky ones who still has a job but for how long?  In the Business Week article, “How to Bounce Back from Career Setbacks”, Marshall Goldsmith outlines how we can mentally deal with the setbacks that come with this uncertain economy of ours.

Now is a better time than ever to start re-examining your career options and seeing what else is out there that you might be good at.  Why not start with something fun like a free IQ Test or “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” free quiz.  Then when you are ready to tackle it, try our in-depth Career Personality Test.  That Career Test will give you insight into your personality and what career options would be a good suit for you.  From there, you can determine whether you need to go back to school for a new degree or can explore new career options directly.  Taking a quiz like this would be a great free way to start doing something about the uncertainty in your career and not wait until it comes crashing down around you!

All of the ups and downs of the mortgage industry over the last five years has come with both great wealth and great losses.  Some invested wisely and made a fortune.  Some took out bad loans and lost their livelihood.  Some brokers sold loans honestly, most did not.

With all of this investor turmoil, we have to also look at how the ups and downs affected the job market.  From 2002-2005 we saw a enormous increase in housing industry jobs including mortgage brokers and real estate agents.  As the market cooled, those jobs went away.  According to monster.com, one out of every six job losses in 2008 came from the financial sector.

So, what are former finance industry workers to do now?  Why not start with a free career test and find your perfect alternate career!  Perhaps your perfect career is actually as a teacher... or government worker.  Perhaps you are best suited for hotel management.  Take one of our free quizzes today!

Are you the type of person who has to see something in order to fully understand it?  For example, a diagram with a concise pictorial representation makes much more sense than a chart with a bunch of words and numbers.  If this describes you, then you are most likely a visual learner and not an auditory learner.

There is nothing wrong with either type of person, but how you study and understand the world might be very different.  Since ideal methods of learning need to differentiate, why not methods of testing?  That is a main reason why we created our Spatial IQ Test.  It provides a visually-based alternative to the standard IQ Test for those of us like myself who best learn visually.

The Spatial IQ Test is a free quiz, so why not give it a try and test out your intelligence, spatially!

If you have ever had a son or daughter bring home a piece of homework that you had no clue how to complete yourself, then you're not alone!  Many of us who have children face this staunch realization of how much knowledge we have actually forgotten from our school years.  Has time really worked that much havoc on our factual knowledge skills?

At FunEducation, there is a way to fine-tune those factual knowledge skills in a fun and informative way.  Complete a free quiz and find out once and for all the answer to the infamous question, "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?".

Perhaps it would be better to start with 1st grade.  You can also test your 1st grade factual knowledge against our new "Are You Smarter than a First Grader?" free quiz.

The questions for both of these free quizzes are taken directly from actual 1st and 5th grade content standards.  This is the exact material real 1st and 5th graders are studying today.  Both tests are free, so you have nothing to lose!  Take a quiz now and find out if you really are smarter than a 5th grader.

How much money does my neighbor (or coworker or friend or ...) make?

Even though most would not ask this question out loud, it is still in the back of many of our minds.  This question is a part of our curiosity and maybe even our competitive drive.  While it might not be a good thing to actually ask your neighbors or friends about their finances, it is definitely beneficial to understand the career options out there.  This is especially true if you are struggling to make ends meet and want something better for the future.

What about checking out the MSN article, "How Long ‘Til You Earn Your First Million?".  The article includes a list of current salaries for a variety of career options.

Ok, so now you know how much a neighbor or friend in a different career might be making, but how do you know which career is right for you?  

At FunEducation, we offer several free tests and quizzes to explore what career would be best for you.  The best and most accurate one is the Free Career Test. This test gives you a very detailed 3-section report about your personality and which career would best fit that personality.

You might also try the free quiz, the Business Management Aptitude Test.  That test allows you to see if you are indeed management material or need additional education to accomplish this goal.

If you do find you need to go back to school to get the job you want, why not try one of the online schools for business professional?  You can get started searching for the perfect school in our Career and Education Center.

Our free quiz, Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?, compares your results to the results of actual 10-year-olds. This great quiz can be found along side our IQ Test, Personality Test, and other great tests and quizzes on the FunEducation website. 

Once you have had a chance to take the 5th Grader quiz, why not check out our brand new quiz, "Are You Smarter than a 1st Grader?". This exciting 15-question quiz tests your knowledge of first grade material. 

Take the test if you dare and find out if you truly are smarter than a 6-year-old!

Do you have the business sense to be the next Warren Buffet?  Maybe you are just not in the right career!  Take one of our free tests or free quizzes to discover yourself.  You can find your perfect career with our Free Career Test or perhaps find out whether you are management material with our Free Business Management Aptitude Test.

You might also check out MSN's article titled, "Is Buffet Smarter Than You?".  It gives a great overview of some of the business savvy Warren Buffet has employed over his successful career.  Maybe YOU will be the next big success story featured on MSN!

Check out our new "Education & Career Center" that was just launched today on our website.  This new feature allows you to search for the perfect college to fit your interests.  You can search for a college by entering information into the "Find a School" box and clicking, "Find School".

Also included in the channel is the article, "Why should you earn your degree online?".  This is an interesting and informative article making the case for why you should go back to school as a working professional and earn your advanced degree.

We also have links to career-oriented free tests and quizzes such as the Free Career Test, the online Free IQ Test, and many others.

We are about ready to launch our new education portal which will allow you to search for the perfect college for you, take exciting free tests and quizzes to discover your perfect career as well as provide other useful free tools for career and education advancement.

In these tough economic times, there have not been better times to re-think your career.  In researching your career, a good place to start is with our free Career Personality Test which is designed to provide a complete personality profile as well as rate you on how well your personality fits into over 300 career choices.  It is a free test, so you have nothing to lose!

After taking the Career Test, you might want to use our new College Search tool to find a college that is right for you.  There are now many online and campus schools across the nation that provide advanced education to working professionals.  Those with advanced degrees typically earn much more than those without degrees, so this might be a good option to look into when considering a new career.

You hear the term, "IQ", used everywhere.  What's my sports IQ?  What's my 5th Grader IQ?  How well do you score on IQ Tests and Quizzes?  How much lower is Bush's IQ than mine?

Where does this term actually come from and what does it stand for?  IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient in English and is the translation of the German phrase, Intelligenz-Quotient, which was coined by the German psychologist, William Stern, in 1912.  Modern IQ tests measure intelligence based on a Gaussian bell curve with a median value of 100.  This means that 100 is used as the baseline for intelligence tests.  Those who score below 100 on IQ Tests are considered below average and scores above 100 on IQ Tests are considered above average.  Of course realizing a score on one particular IQ Test or other free quizzes such as the Free IQ Test does not deliver the entire picture of intelligence.  Many people are more visual learners and others are more auditory learners.  This is one factor that could affect intelligence scores. 

When taking IQ Tests on our website, we recommend taking both the Verbal Free IQ Test and the Free Spatial IQ Test.  That will test you in several different ways so you can be sure to get an accurate score.

Did you see the MSN article, "Why Americans Aren't Dumb?"

It outlines the suggestion that we are entering a dark age of reason due to our "WII-playing" ways but then counters that by saying that our average IQ has increased steadily for decades.  Are we really Smarter than a Fifth Grader?  Are we increasing in intelligence from generation to generation or are we losing ground?

Kids seem to be doing both.  They are excelling at certain academic areas and yet the average American student can't pick out America on the map.  But could the average American ever do this?

Why not try these concepts out yourself.  We offer a Kids IQ Test and a Free IQ Test for adults.  If you have kids, you can have them take their IQ Test, you can take your free quiz, and then both of you can compare the results!  Post your results as a comment to this blog.

The Free IQ Test on our FunEducation.com website consists of four distinct sections: quantitative, spatial, verbal, words, and fill in the blank.  Each are designed to test a different area of intelligence to generate the final IQ score.  From my experience, the most intriguing aspects of tests like this is the elements of spatial reasoning.  What I mean by spatial reasoning is thinking about objects and space and using those mental visual images to calculate answers.  For some people, this can be quite challenging, for others it is quite easy.

The Free IQ Test is a 42-question test which will give a mostly accurate IQ score especially for a test of its brevity.  If you want an even more accurate assessment, why not take the Spatial IQ Quiz which is a 200-item test and goes into more depth.  This will give you the opportunity to test out those spatial reasoning skills!  And best of all, it is FREE!

Are you smarter than a fifth grader?  How about a college student?  What is your IQ?  These are all great questions to ask when exploring your own intelligence and where you are in life.

Let's start with the first question.  A lot of time has undoubtedly passed since you were in the 5th grade which is now the last year of elementary school.  Do you still remember all of the material you did when you graduated elementary school?  Would you even be able to pass a test that all 5th graders take at the end of the year?  Take our free "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" quiz and find the answer to that question right now.  It is a great start to self discovery.

Once that question is answered, how about a larger question of whether you are in the right job.  As time passes, interests change, personalities change - even your IQ can change.  How do you know what career options best fit your current personality?  That is the question that our Free Career Test addresses with its multi-point assessment.

If you don't like where you are in life, maybe it is time to go back to school and enroll in one of the great colleges for working professionals.  They now make it easy to get a higher education degree while still working and making enough money to support yourself.

How about starting with our Free IQ Test to see where you are with your IQ.  You might be surprised when you take the free quiz!

A visitor who took our Free IQ Test had a comment regarding one of the questions.

In order not to jeopardize the accuracy of your results on our free quiz, we have changed the question slightly but kept the meaning the same.

I have a couple comments with regard to an item on the IQ test, "If some CRAMMERS are WIDGETS and some WIDGETS are BLOGGERS, then some CRAMMERS are definitely BLOGGERS".

Comment #1:   In your explanation of the answer, you substitute the words CRAMMERS, WIDGETS, and BLOGGERS with the words CATS, ANIMALS, and DOGS, so the sentence reads "if some CATS are ANIMALS, and some ANIMALS are DOGS, then some CATS are definitely DOGS". However, this doesn't make any sense since ALL CATS are ANIMALS. It would make much more sense to use the words SNAKES, PETS, and DOGS as substitutions, so the sentence reads, "If some SNAKES are PETS, and some PETS are DOGS, then some SNAKES are definitely DOGS", in which case the answer would indeed be FALSE. (I prefer to use SNAKES rather than CATS since it is not entirely accurate to say that "SOME CATS are pets" since in actuality, "MOST CATS are pets", while the most accurate statement with regard to SNAKES would indeed be that SOME SNAKES are PETS).

Comment #2: Although the substitutions I suggested in Comment #1 further strengthen your contention regarding the answer, I am not so sure that this is always the case. For example, if I instead substitute the words CRAMMERS, WIDGETS, and BLOGGERS with the words DOGS, POODLES, and GRAY, so the sentence reads, "if some DOGS are POODLES, and some POODLES are GRAY, then some DOGS are definitely GRAY, wouldn't that make this sentence TRUE?

These are great comments and it is always good to be analytical of tests and questions especially with IQ Tests and Spatial IQ Quizzes.  These tests and quizzes are really meant to get your mind going as an exercise as much as an accurate assessment of your IQ score.  

Can you figure out the answer to this question?  Post a comment!

 

Have you seen the show, "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?"

I was wondering if I am really Smarter than a 5th Grader and so I took the free quiz on FunEducation.com to find out.  It turns out I really am smarter than a 5th grader.  Did any of you take the quiz and find out you are not smarter?  I'd be qurious to see your IQ score from a Free IQ Test or Spatial IQ Test and see if being Smarter than a Fifth Grader has an impact on IQ!

Take the test and post your results here in a comment and let's find out! 

The term, "IQ", stands for Intelligence Quotient and is a general measure of a person's intelligence.  It is widely used and commonly accepted as the standard for measuring intelligence in the United States and around the world.

You can find out your IQ score by taking a test such as our Free IQ Test or Spatial IQ Test.  There are also many other free quizzes on the internet you can use for a second opinion.

The scoring mechanism for calculating the IQ score is quite complex, however it's interpretation can be understood quite easily.  The average intelligence score is 100.  You can then take a Free IQ Test or Spatial IQ Test to find your score for comparison.  An IQ score of 100 is considered "average" or the 50th percentile.  The majority of the population falls into the 85-115 IQ score range.  A much smaller percentage fall into the below 85 and above 115 category.