The career site Glassdoor.com went through tens of thousands of the weirdest interview questions that were submitted by job seekers who'd been asked them over the past 15 months and came up with a list of the strangest. Fortune columnist Anne Fisher writes that the interviewers in most cases seemed more interested in how applicants responded, listening to their thought process and seeing how well they kept their cool, than in receiving a correct response. Following are some of the questions from Glassdoor's list and the company where they were asked:

• "Using a scale of 1 to 10, rate yourself on how weird you are." -- Capital One
• "Explain quantum electrodynamics in two minutes, starting now." -- Intel
• "How many balloons would fit in this room?" -- PricewaterhouseCoopers
• "If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?" -- Goldman Sachs
• "What is the philosophy of martial arts?" -- Aflac
• "Explain to me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years." -- Boston Consulting
• "If you could be any superhero, which one would you be?" -- AT&T
• "How do you weigh an elephant without using a scale?" -- IBM
• "If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?" -- Amazon
• "How many bricks are there in Shanghai? Consider only residential buildings." --Deloitte Consulting
• "You have five bottles of pills. One bottle has 9 gram pills, the others have 10 gram pills. You have a scale that can be used only once. How can you find out which bottle contains the 9 gram pills?" --eBay
• "What is your fastball?" -- Ernst & Young
• "How would you market ping pong balls if ping pong itself became obsolete? List many ways, then pick one and go into detail." -- Microsoft
• "How many smartphones are there in New York City?" -- Google
• "Why do you think only a small percentage of the population makes over $125,000 a year?" -- New York Life