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Reprint edition published in April 2020.

"Know yourself" is an ancient adage, "Know your IQ" is modern craze. The Greeks bequeathed to us the former. The British Bequeathed to us the latter. It was left to the Americans. To make a scientific fad out of them. "Modern psychoanalysts believe", says H.J. Eysenck nevertheless there is no doubt that most people have an intense interest in their own personality,temperament, intelligence, traits, abilities, complexes and so forth". What is IQ? It is wrong to believe that intelligence tests are developed and constructed according to a rational derived from sound scientific theory. There are also some difficulties encountered in going from the ivory tower to the market place. But there is no such thing as alleged inapplicability of psychological science to practical problems of applied life. Intelligence Tests, right from the beginning, have been outstandingly successful in their practical application. The evidence on this part is overwhelming. Useful measurements can be undertaken even in the absence of a sound theoretical basis. Temperature, for example, can be measured in subjective terms. This was enunciated by the physicist, Dolbear in 1897, working with snowy tree cricket. His formula runs as follows: "Count the number of chirps this animal produces in fifteen seconds and add forty, the sum is the temperature obtaining at the time in degrees Fahrenheit". It was the French psychologist, Binet who came up with the theory that mental abilities and functions should be measured by means of mental tests clearly involving these functions and abilities. In 1904 the Ministry of Public Instruction in Paris appointed a commission to study procedures for the education of mentally subnormal children attending Paris schools, and it was in response to this practical demand that Binet prepared his first scale. Binet constructed a series of thirty problems or tests which were meant to call for judgment, comprehension and reasoning. The problems were of such a nature that these could be understood and solved without benefit of special school learning. For example- "This is a garden in which you have lost your ball. This gap represents the entrance. Use your pencil to show me how you would search for the ball". Any systematic search, i.e in ever-decreasing circles or going up and down along parallel paths, is counted as a correct solution, while a vague wandering about is considered incorrect. The problems varied widely in difficulty and Binet from the easiest to the most difficult by noticing the percentage of right answers given by the various groups of children. Mental Age: IQ test lead to the understanding of the concept of Mental age. A child of ten may have knowledge and understading of life current among children fifteen years old. His mental age would be fifteen. On the contrary a boy of fifteen may have mental age of only eight or nine years. The child who is two years advanced at the age of two would be something like eight years advanced at The age of eight. Thus what remains constant is the ratio mental age over chronological age, rather than the difference and it is this ratio (usually multiplied by 100 to get rid of the decimal point) which is referred to as Intelligence Quotient". Let us consider two children both with the mental age of eight. The first has a chronoloqical age of six and so his IQ Would be 133. The other has a chronological age of twelve and so His IQ would be 67. How Popular is IQ?: "The IQ has achieved immediate popularity and in Spite of its many imperfections it has remained probably one of the most widely known psychological concepts among teachers, psychiatrists, social workers, and others connected in some way with psychology".