How many cats in Los Angeles?

The other day, a friend of mine was summoned to attend an interview in a research marketing company.

Yes, he was quite keen to join that multinational company, but before that, he was required to answer several subjective questions as part of the interview process.

Questions which are subjectively involved are always meant to discover individual ideas or opinions rather than facts. However, he was out of his conscious mind as he stumbled upon this..

  • How many cats are there in Los Angeles?

My real question is, how to answer this with no reference books or Internet access? How to calculate? Why cats, not dogs? Is this an IQ question?

My poor friend doesn't even know how many cats in his own neighborhood.. worse, now it's referring to largest city in the state of California.

His brain had absolutely no idea, so eventually the question was skipped. Later at home, he curiously tried to google it and this is what he found..

  • Due to lots of rain in LA, there will only be indoor cats, but people in LA are too poor to buy cats. Only people in Beverly Hills part of LA are rich enough to buy cats, but they are too busy working and got no time to take care of the cats. In the end, those rich people have to hire old nannies to take care of the cats, but old people in Beverly Hills are too superstitious and don't like cats.

So based on the assumption, there are no cats in LA.

What a brilliant answer! Tehe!

Personally, I don't think any candidates actually have time cracking jokes like this one during a 30-minute interview test. I suppose when they saw that question for the first time, they already damn stunned.

Anyway, my friend was hired at the end of the interview.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice post..! I don't know the answer at first too :)

Matchfingers said...

I don't understand the purpose of that question as well.

Well, if someone doesn't get it.. then how to provide an answer? ..Tehe!

Unknown said...

Definitely an assumption thingy. Maybe it's a trend for interviewers to send out this question.
I would love to know the real answer though.