Upvoted. Heat conduction is involved in the true answer. The student has demonstrated that he at least knows where to start thinking about the question. I’d have more respect for someone who said ‘heat conduction’, or for that matter ‘caloric flow’,and tried to work out how that might work than someone who said ‘fairies’. Given that this is a question from a physics teacher, you’re not wrong to try to find physics explanations before you go to ‘trickery’, which is exactly the sort of ‘explain everything’ hypothesis that we’re nervous of.
Upvoted. Heat conduction is involved in the true answer. The student has demonstrated that he at least knows where to start thinking about the question. I’d have more respect for someone who said ‘heat conduction’, or for that matter ‘caloric flow’,and tried to work out how that might work than someone who said ‘fairies’. Given that this is a question from a physics teacher, you’re not wrong to try to find physics explanations before you go to ‘trickery’, which is exactly the sort of ‘explain everything’ hypothesis that we’re nervous of.