Here's the thing about IQ curves. Let's assume, for the moment, that we create a new "WQ" (waps quotient). It is 1000 random questions that you either know or don't know, which have absolutely nothing to do with eachother (who is the beatles' lead singer, what is the 7th prime number, did Mr. Garrison ever kill Kenny, is Spam searching related to Bayes' rule ? (nope, it's Bayes theorem), ...

For every question you have right you get +0.1, for every wrong answer you get 0. Obviously this proves nothing about you, except that you've at some point looked up the beatles, or actually looked up history of Thomas Bayes, or ... In other words it's a long list of "do you know trick X" bits.

What would the division of WQ in the population look like ? Exactly like the division of IQ in the population. [1] [2]

Here's a supposition : the IQ stat is exactly that. It's measuring of how many of the "little tricks" known by a test maker you know. The better you match the test maker, the better your score (think mostly cultural, but also whether your parents are academics or not, ...)

Although I must say, teaching kids "tricks" with numbers (e.g. how to tell if a number is divisible by 9 by looking at individual digits) and symbols is a good way to make them good at math over time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution (read top paragraph, note that n will be a relatively large 1000) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution#Normal_ap...