Exams

Exams!
These are systems in place since ancient times. Conducting an exam is very similar to doing an experiment.
You do an experiment or a trail to separate salt out of water. You need a suitable experience or a test for that. You can choose to distill the water or evaporate the water.
Or suppose you wish to separate iron particles from sand. You hover a piece of magnet above it.

Similarly, you wish to segregate the able from the less able student, for which you need to do some experiment or some examination. But please note, you can't use distillation to segregate iron and you can't use magnet to get salt.

In the same way, you cant use drawing as a test or a criteria for picking out good dancers. And finally, you can't use MCQs to choose the better doctors!!!

Keeping that aside, the pattern of exams for their respective specialities has been more or less constant. Physical tests for being in army, memory based tests for science, calculation based tests for engineering, logic based tests for IQ, grammar based tests for language, etc

Coming back to the corollary, very few new experiments or methods of segregation have been devised recently. So I thought about a new test for finding out the "street smartness" or pragmatic approach of a person.
We can ask the person to define very simple and trivial things. And mind you, things like
- thought
- dream
- soul
- love
- sky
- magic
- death
- to be alive / to live
- good and bad
- sleep vs coma
- aim vs objective
- wind vs air
- friend
And more and more things can be added to the list, forever.
Asking a person to define these things for you, will give you an insight into the thinking of that person. It may help us to "judge someone" better.

Till then, kindly comment if you know of more such words that are difficult to define but everyone knows about it. Thanks!