Google has a strange interview question that many get wrong — can you solve it?

Interviews are hard as it is without employers resorting to trick questions to vet a candidate. No one enjoys sitting for their turn, anticipating what questions may be thrown their way. Google for instance is known to ask a rather bizarre interview question that nearly every candidate fails to get right. 

Past candidates reported having been asked, "How many golf clubs can fit in a 747?" and "How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?" But the most outrageous question actually is: "You are shrunken down to the size of a coin and dropped into a tall blender, what should you do to escape before the blender turns on in 60 seconds?" As reported by Unilad, most people get stumped as nervous jitters take over.

To find out the right answer, reporters reached out to top experts from the field of human physiology. Interestingly, scientists claimed that one of the most common 'correct' answers may not actually be the right choice. When interviewers ask the challenging question, the response most often is simply to jump. The idea behind this dates back to a 17th-century observation by Alfonso Borelli, who claimed that animals, regardless of their size, seemed to jump to roughly the same height. According to Borelli, this happens because the energy generated by our muscles is proportional to our mass, as reported by the Daily Mail.

Professor Gregory Sutton, a specialist in insect movement at the University of Lincoln, also shared his insights on this. He said, "If you just imagine muscle as something that produces energy, the muscle produces mechanical energy that can accelerate the animal up to a certain height. If that animal is half the size, it has half the energy but it also has half the mass so it jumps to the same height." Citing an example, he said, "One grasshopper can jump about a meter high. Two grasshoppers holding hands—twice as much mass, twice as much muscle—can jump a meter high. A million grasshoppers holding hands—a million times as much mass, a million times as much muscle—can jump a meter high."

However, Sutton explained that a human the size of a coin could only jump 10-15 cm—far too short to escape a blender. So, jumping out is practically impossible. Instead, the animal expert revealed that if he were shrunk down and put in a blender, he would use a rubber band to fling himself out. He explained, "The catapult system would work great at that size because your strength-to-mass ratio is very beneficial even if your jumping mechanisms don't work so well.” Meanwhile, a former Google software engineer, Gayle McDowell, shared that these questions are basically to test a candidate's problem-solving skills rather than their accuracy.