Pie Fight

Zoë's likes this old Curious George learning game. As you can clearly see from the screen cap if you click, one of the features is "Pie Fight". Three clowns behind three lecterns with pictures. "Click on the one that's bigger." "Click on the one that's different." That sort of thing. If you get it right, the clown gets a pie in the face. If you get it wrong, the clown pies you. So Zoë gets all the way to level 6. And there's a bird, a turtle, and a dog. All the same size. "Click on the one that's different!" Enthuses the voice. Zoë looks at me in horror. Well, what would YOU click?

[Hmmmm, had a blogpoll, but it was making the page go wonky. Oh well, democracy has no place in biology anyway. Vote in comments, if you care to.]

ANSWER: The dog. "That's right! The dog has fur!"

Comments

[LizardBreath]

Man. I was laughing to myself, but thinking "Even though it's an unfair question, come on, it's obviously the turtle. Birds and dogs are both warm-blooded."

Pied.

[jim]

Birds can't swim

[ben wolfson]

So are the others wrong? If you click the turtle, will it say, "that's right! The turtle has a shell!"?

[Cala]

I vote for the bird. The bird flies and only has two feet.

[joe cool in EH]

dog. birds & turtles hatch from eggs.

but you've left out one piece of key information - you say the characters are all the same size, but what color(s) are they in the game? if both the bird & the turtle are green, . . .

& btw, some birds can swim very nicely (see penguins & cormorants) and not all birds are capable of flight (see penguins, emus, kiwis & ostriches).

[yabonn]

Was the dog fabulous?

[ogged]

I would have said the bird, because it only has two feet. "Fur," obviously, is a dumb answer, because the other two don't share a characteristic in the relevant category.

[Jonathan Lundell]

I've seen SAT questions that make no more sense than this one. (I'm with ogged: for one to be "different", the other two have to be "the same" in some related way. Bird.)

[Jeremy Osner]

I think Turtle and Bird share a common ancestor more recent than the common ancestor of Turtle, Bird and Dog. So maybe that is a justification for saying Dog is the odd man out.

[ben wolfson]

Dogs don't hatch from eggs.

[SamChevre]

If the question were addressed to high-schoolers, I would say "Turtle"--warm-blooded/cold-blooded is biologically important.

Since it is addressed to preschoolers, I would go with "bird"--2 feet vs. 4.