Are you ready to take up some challenging problems?

Here is an interesting one.

Cross out six letters from the following sequence so that the remaining letters, without altering their sequence, spell a well- known word:

B S I A N X L A E T N T A E R S

Duration: Five minutes. If you are successful it is OK. If not please refer the answer given below:

The answer is ‘B A N A N A’

The clue suggests us to remove six letters. Normally everyone will try to identify the unwanted six letters. But by the selective encoding approach it would be much easier to remove the very words six and letters which have in fact ten letters.

How much sand is there in a hole of one foot wide one foot length and one foot deep?

Duration: Thirty seconds

The answer for the above problem is given below:

A hole is a hole only when there is no sand. Hence in a hole there will be no sand at all!

We may quote two more problems analysed by R.J. Sternberg for selective encoding. Please try these two problems.

1) Twenty three students are studying in a classroom. All but seven of them went on a museum trip and thus were away for the day. How many of them remained in class that day.

2) An airplane crashes on the U.S.-Canadian border. In what country are the survivors buried?

These problems again require selective encoding for their correct solution.

Take the first problem. People frequently immediately subtract seven from twenty-three to obtain sixteen as their answer. But this answer is incorrect. The critical word in the problem is “but”. It is not the case that seven students went on the museum trip but rather that “all but seven” went on the trip.

In the second problem the critical word is “survivors”. The correct solution to this problem requires careful reading and selective encoding of the word “survivors”.

Unless you read the problem very carefully, you will not come up with the correct answer that the survivors are not buried.

The mind runs in the usual track always and we are not able to go deep into the problem to find out the answer. Breathe for a moment, close your eyes, think clearly and you will get the solution.

Now the readers can list out their own problems for selective encoding.