Some people say that parents have the most important role in a child development. However, others argue that other things like Television or friends have the most significant influence. Discuss both views and give your opinion.

Consider the

yeti

. Reputed to live in the mountainous regions of Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal.

Also

known by the alias Abominable Snowman. Overgrown, in both senses: eight or ten or twelve feet tall; shaggy. Shy. Possibly a remnant of an

otherwise

extinct species. More possibly an elaborate hoax, or an inextinguishable hope. Closely related to the Australian Yowie, the Canadian Nuk-luk, the Missouri Momo, the Louisiana Swamp Ape, and Bigfoot. O.K.,

then

: on a scale not of zero to ten but of, say, leprechaun to zombie, how likely do you think it is that the

yeti

exists? One of the strangest things about the human mind is that it can reason about unreasonable things. It is possible,

for example

, to calculate the speed at which the sleigh would have to travel for Santa Claus to deliver all those gifts on Christmas Eve. It is possible to assess the ratio of a dragon’s wings to its body to determine if it could fly. And it is possible to decide that a

yeti

is more likely to exist than a leprechaun, even if you think that the likelihood of either of them existing is precisely zero. Never mind, for now, whether or not you actually believe in any of these creatures. We are interested here not in whether they are real but in to what extent they seem as if they could be. Your job,

accordingly

, is to rank them in order of plausibility, from most likely (No. 1) to least likely (No. 20). Better still, if you are in the mood for a party game

this

Halloween season, try having a lot of people rank them collectively. I guarantee that

this

will produce a surprising amount of concord—who among us could rank the tooth fairy above the Leviathan?—

as well as

a huge amount of impassioned disagreement. The Loch Ness monster will turn out to have a Johnnie Cochran-level defense attorney. Good friends of yours will say withering things about mermaids. What’s odd about

this

exercise is that everyone knows that “impossible” is an absolute condition. “Possible versus impossible” is not like “tall versus short.” Tall and short exist on a gradient, and when we adjudge the Empire State Building taller than LeBron James and LeBron James taller than Meryl Streep, we are reflecting facts about the world we live in. But possibility and impossibility are binary, and when we adjudge the

yeti

more probable than the leprechaun we aren’t reflecting facts about the world we live in; we aren’t reflecting the world we live in at all. So how, exactly, are we drawing these distinctions? And what does it say about our own wildly implausible, unmistakably real selves that we are able to do so? In the fourth century B.C., several hundred years after the advent of harpies and some two millennia before the emergence of dementors, Aristotle sat down to do some thinking about supernatural occurrences in literature. On the whole, he was not a fan; in his Poetics, he mostly discouraged would-be fabulists from messing around with them. But he did allow that, if forced to choose, writers “should prefer a probable impossibility to an unconvincing possibility.” Better for Odysseus to return safely to Ithaca with the aid of ghosts, gods, sea nymphs, and a leather bag containing the wind than for his wife, Penelope, to get bored with waiting for him, grow interested in metalworking, and abandon domestic life for a career as a blacksmith.