The Times author writes:

People have different tastes for risk, just as they have different tastes for ice cream or paint colors. The same is true for waiting: Would you rather have $400 now or $100 every year for 10 years? How about $3,400 this month or $3,800 next month? Different people will answer differently.

Professor Shane Frederick of the Sloan School at MIT has discovered striking systematic patterns in how people answer questions about risk and patience, including those above.

Getting the math problems right predicts nothing about most tastes, including whether someone prefers apples or oranges, Coke or Pepsi, rap music or ballet. But high scorers - those who get all the questions right - do prefer taking risks.

They are also more patient, particularly when the difference, and the implied interest rate, is large. Choosing $3,400 this month over $3,800 next month implies an annual discount rate of 280 percent. Yet only 35 percent of low scorers - those who missed every question - said they would wait, while 60 percent of high scorers preferred the later, bigger payoff.

Men and women also show different results. "Expressed loosely," he writes, "being smart makes women patient and makes men take more risks."

High-scoring women show slightly more willingness to wait than high-scoring men, while the differences in risk-taking are much larger. High-scoring women are about as willing to gamble as low-scoring men, while low-scoring women are even more risk-averse

For instance, 80 percent of high-scoring men would pick a 15 percent chance of $1 million over a sure $500, compared with only 38 percent of high-scoring women, 40 percent of low-scoring men and 25 percent of low-scoring women.

The correct answers, by the way, are 5 cents, 5 minutes, and 47 days.