A Genius Boy Becomes the Youngest Mensa Member in the UK
- The Guardian
VIVA – Three-year-old Teddy Hobbs has become the youngest Mensa member in the UK with the ability to read and count fluently in seven languages. Mensa is an organization for people with high IQs. Teddy Hobbs is from Portishead, Somerset. He is known to have learned to read and count on his own while watching television on a tablet without his parents knowing.
The cleverness of Teddy Hobbs is known by his parents recently. Teddy’s mother, Beth, said they initially thought he was just making sounds while playing on his tablet before they realized he was actually sounding out numerals in the Chinese language.
“He chooses a new topic or something to be interested in every couple of months or so, it seems. Sometimes it’s numbers. It was times tables for a while that was a very intense period, then countries and maps, learning to count in different languages,” she explained to BBC Radio 4’s Today program.
Teddy Hobbs, anggota Mensa termuda di Inggris
- Daily Mail
“He was playing on his tablet, we’ve put appropriate games like Thomas the Tank Engine on and he was sat there, making the sounds I just didn’t recognize and I asked him what it was...'oh mummy, I’m counting in Mandarin’.” as quoted from the Guardian site.
His parents said that his son's IQ score is at the 99.5 percentile for his age in the Times report. "And, we'll keep it that way as long as we can. He's starting to figure it out now because his friends can't read and he's kind of asking questions like 'why?'," she said.
"But it's really important for us to keep him grounded. If he can do these things, fine. But he just sees it as 'Okay, I can read but my friend can run faster than me. We all have our talents'," he continued.
"And we'll try to keep him as long as possible. If he decides to go to school, he finishes his education, that's fine."
As information, Mensa only accepts people who score in the top 2% of the general population on supervised IQ tests. While it does not usually assess children, parents can test their children through educational psychologists.
