"common sense" questions

What's being called "common sense" questions in this video are more like questions designed to catch you if you're not paying attention. Beyond that, the questions require you to be too literal or, contrarily, to think utterly outside the box.

Here's are examples of "common sense" questions from my youth:

1. A rooster in the northern hemisphere sits on a north-facing barn's rooftop and lays an egg. Which side of the barn does the egg roll down?
   ANSWER: Roosters don't lay eggs.
2. A plane full of Californians is flying from DC to California. The plane crashes east of the Mississippi River. Where do you bury the survivors?
   ANSWER: Survivors are alive.

The point of the above two questions is to see whether you're paying attention. While paying attention is part of common sense, common sense is itself a fairly vague (albeit useful), broad notion. Is a question that tests your attention to words really testing your overall common sense? We haven't even defined common sense yet, so how would we even know? Or how about these questions and answers from the video? Look—

1. C is the father of D, but D is not the son of C. How is that possible?
   ANSWER: D is the daughter.
2. How can a man go nine days without sleep?
   ANSWER: by sleeping at night.

So (1) is something akin to a logic question. Is common sense therefore reasoning? And (2) requires you to be suspicious of the wording and to take the wording super-literally, i.e., to answer correctly, you must think that days = daytime. Note the trick is made even more complicated by the fact that days is a plural countable noun while daytime is normally uncountable. (Who says "many daytimes ago"?) So question (2) requires out-of-the-box thinking. Is that what common sense is?

When I was a kid, and my dad knew everything, Dad's terse definition of common sense was: If it's raining, go inside or get an umbrella. Short, sweet, simple. I imagine that a lot of men of his generation would say that.

Whatever your definition of it, I reject the idea that this quiz is testing for common sense. It's testing for a vague set of skills that may or may not be applicable to the undefined faculty of common sense. If I were teaching a course on test design, I'd be tempted to use this video as an example of how not to design questions for quizzes and tests.