A wonderful collection of oddly brilliant questions and answers taken from the infamously challenging Oxbridge interviews.

'What happens if I drop an ant?' 'What books are bad for you?' 'What percentage of the world's water is contained in a cow?' The Oxbridge undergraduate interviews are infamous for their unique ways of assessing candidates, and from these peculiar enquiries, professors can tell just how smart you really are. Cambridge-educated John Farndon has collected together 75 of the most intriguing questions taken from actual admission interviews and gives full answers to each, taking the reader through the fascinating histories, philosophies, sciences and arts that underlie each problem. Oxford graduate Libby Purves lends her own thoughts and reflections on what it's like to have your mind stretched in unusual ways in a thorough introduction. This is a book for everyone who likes to think they're clever, or who thinks they'd like to be clever. And cleverness is not just knowing stuff, it's how laterally, deeply and interestingly you can bend your brain. Guesstimating the population of Croydon, for example, opens a chain of thought from which you can predict the strength of a nuclear bomb ... and that's just the start of it.