What is the Workout?

The Workout challenge at the bottom of this page involves answering 30 questions in 30 minutes. This quiz is provided for entertainment purposes only: it's not an IQ test and your score will not qualify you for Mensa. Nevertheless, if you're pleased with your score, you might want to consider taking a properly administered and supervised IQ test. If so, you can contact your nearest Mensa office for more information. To see your national Mensa's website, email address, and other information, please click here: Choose Your Country​

Of course, you'll be able to take the actual test in your first language. However, this Mensa Workout is biased towards people whose primary language is English. Your local Mensa organisation may have similar workout-style tests available in your first language. Why not contact them and find out?

As mentioned above, there's a 30-minute time limit for this Workout. There's no point in rushing: you won’t get a higher score if you finish the test in 10 minutes! So, take your time – and just enjoy it! When you finish the test, answers to the questions and a discussion of the answers will appear.

IMPORTANT: The questions in this quiz were devised by Dr. Abbie Salny, and they are subject to copyright. Permission to use any of the questions may be granted for educational or other approved purposes by contacting Mensa International.

What are the benefits?

Aside from it being fun to do quizzes and satisfying to solve puzzles, there are other, less obvious benefits to these kinds of activity:

First, the brain is an organ which performs better with regular workouts, just as other bodily organs do. Think of workouts like this one as Mental Aerobics! Regular exercises and challenges to the brain will keep your mind healthy and active, ensure that there are active neural connections, improve mental associations and retrieval paths, and may stave off dementia in later years.

The second benefit is that workouts like the one below are designed to exercise different parts of the brain. They encourage you to think laterally, so you learn to look at problems from several different aspects rather than the obvious approach. This is the kind of mental training that can help you to improve your problem-solving approaches in day-to-day life, and possibly to improve your test scores.