A 12-year-old girl in England just scored higher on a Mensa IQ test than notorious high-IQ-havers Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Now, you might think such a thing would require months of practicing. Well, guess again. The Colchester Daily Gazette reports high-schooler Lydia Sebastian didn't really prepare at all. Well, surely it must have been quite the challenge for her, you say. Nope. "At first I was really nervous, but once I started, it was much easier than I expected it to be," she tells the Guardian. Sebastian's perfect score of 162 on the 150-question Cattell III B test puts her in the top 1% of Mensa members, the Times of India reports. It also beats the 160 scored by Einstein and Hawking.
Sebastian took the test—which focuses on verbal reasoning, analogies, and logic—during her summer holiday, the Daily Gazette reports. She got the results back Aug. 28. “She had looked at the websites for the IQ tests herself and had shown an interest in them and talked to my wife about them. ... She was talking about it for over a year," father Arun Sebastian tells the Guardian. "When I heard she had the maximum possible mark, I was overwhelmed and so was my wife." But, lest you think you have nothing in common with this historically smart pre-teen: She has also read all seven Harry Potter books multiple times. (The rest of us might be able to blame our lousy IQ scores on a hidden virus.)
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