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Are You Smarter than a Ten Year Old?

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  • Posted at 11:15am
  • 15 November 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT
  • 3 comments

Am I smarter than a ten year old? Well, that depends. If I was put head to head with a primary-school kid and challenged to, say, arrange a skiing holiday for 20 people, I'd be fairly confident that I wouldn't cock up the flights, forget to inform the group of the maximum baggage allowance, or burst into tears if I had trouble finding a hotel.

But, on the other hand, I've not had a French vocab test in 20 years – thank goodness – so the ten year old, fresh out of last week's double French lesson, might have a chance of beating me and shouting, "J'ai gagné!"

Similarly, I couldn't tell you the dates of the reign of Elizabeth I, the chemical formula for sulphuric acid, or confidently annotate a cross section of a volcano. I used to be able to. But that just makes me, well, more forgetful than a ten year old. Not a great premise for a programme, is it? But I'm afraid it exists.

On this show, adults have to answer a range of hilariously easy questions in order to win up to £50,000. Seriously, these questions make the first five on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? feel like taking on a PhD in Bioinformatics. But, should the adults become confused under the glare of the studio lights, a group of precocious ten year olds are also answering the questions on their secret electronic pads, and they'll be on hand to help out – albeit while sniggering slightly.

Tuesday's show featured a 62-year-old computer consultant. "How old are you?" asked the presenters, Dick and Dom. "I'm 62," he replied. "And what the hell are you doing on this programme?" I mumbled from the sofa. "And what are you doing on this show?" asked Dick and Dom, in an unexpected echo. "It's my wife's fault," he replied, pointing to her in the huge audience which had congregated to watch this battle between Goliath, and several Davids in school uniform.

He breezed through the answers, the only minor problems occurring on subjects that just weren't taught at school in the 1950s. Anyone over the age of 45, for example, will regard something like Venn diagrams with confusion and suspicion. But hey, that's not their fault.

Dick and Dom were trying, hilariously, to introduce a note of suspense into proceedings, but our contestant was having none of it. What's the chemical formula for salt? "Sodium chloride," he announced immediately. "Um... Do you think there's any point in us doing the prolonged silence thing?" Dick asked Dom, or vice versa, I dunno. "Mm. He's very confident, isn't he."

Of course he is, he's a 62-year-old computer consultant, and you're asking him elementary general knowledge questions. The queues to go on this programme must be hundreds of thousands strong, and if they're not, let me have a go, I'll take Rupert Murdoch's money if no-one else wants it.

Having said all that, he walked away at the £7,500 point, having forgotten what number the Roman numeral "D" represented. His forfeit was to look into the camera and announce that he wasn't as smart as a ten year old. I think I could put up with this minor humiliation in exchange for £7,500.

To discover whether you can outthink a schoolchild, watch Are You Smarter than a Ten Year Old? on Sky One (Sky 106).

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  • Posted on 04 January 2008
  • at 11:22pm
  • by Katiie Babiiehh_x

Actually Youu Can Win Uptoo £250,000 Thought id Tell Ya ;)

  • Posted on 26 December 2007
  • at 1:12pm
  • by Dronfieldman

I agree with the previous poster. It is a fundamental aspect of Maths that multiplication takes precedence over addition, giving the correct answer as 5. As all the children got the answer wrong, it alarms me slightly that not only did the programme researcher not know his Maths but that the children's teacher was teaching them incorrect Maths at school.

  • Posted on 17 December 2007
  • at 3:32pm
  • by jb76

I watched this for the first time on Saturday. Am I smarter than a ten year old? Who knows. Am I smarter than their researchers? Well, if they believe that the answer to 5+3x0 is 0 then, yes . The answer should be 5 as the multiplication is a higher priority than the addition and therefore gets done first. For the answer to be 0 the sum should have been (5+3)x0.

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