Chapter 3: The Trouble
with Geniuses part 1
By Kim Huber & Maddie Bonavita
 He was a special guest on an American quiz show 1 vs. 100
 Some call him the smartest man in America
 His IQ is 195
 He was speaking at 6 months of age
Chris Langan
 When he was 3 he taught himself how to read
 He was able to pass tests without studying and just by skimming
through the material
 He got a perfect score on his SAT’s
 He would hardly attend school and he would just show up for tests
 Lewis Terman a professor of psychology at Stanford University
Stanford-Binet
test
 His specialty was intelligent testing
 He met a boy named Henry Cowell, he thought he was intelligent
so he decided to give him the Stanford-binet IQ test because he
wanted to know how he would do
 Henry Cowells IQ score was above 140
 In 1921 Terman decided to make the study of the gifted his life
work
 He formed a team of field workers and sent them into Californians
elementary school
 The brightest students in the classes were given intelligence tests
Lewis Terman
and his
research
 Students who scores top 10% were given a second IQ test the
students who scored above 130 on the second test were given a
third test
 From those results Terman selected the brightest students
 Out of the records of 250 thousand students only 1,470 children's
IQ’s averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200
 They were known as the “termites”, became one of the most
famous psychological studies in hirtory.
 He watched over them for the rest of his life to track and tested,
measures and analyzed.
 Raven’s Progressive Matrices is the most widely used intelligence
test
 It’s a measure of abstract reasoning skills
 Divergent test requires you to use your imagination
 People with an IQ below 70 are considered mentally disabled
IQ Tests
 A score of a 100 is average
 In general the higher your score is, the more education you will
get, the more money you will make
 British psychologist Liam Hudson says IQ is a lot like height in
basketball
 A basketball player only has to be tall enough, same is true with
intelligence
 Gladwell says that people think Nobel prize winners in science just
have the highest IQ scores who got perfect scores on their
entrance exams to college
Gladwell’s take
on IQ scores
 For example: where the last 25 Americans to win the Nobel prize in
medicine got their undergraduate degrees, starting in 2007
 Yale, Colombia and MIT are on the list but also DePauw Holy Cross
and Gettysburg College which are only good schools
 Colleges are ranked and should not be. Georgetown's students
may not be on the same scale as Harvard's students but they are
all clearly smart enough.
 Another example: Einstein had an IQ of 150 while Langan had an
IQ of 195 however this does not mean Langan was 30% smarter
they both are clearly extremely smart
 This chapter connects to success by saying someone may have a
higher IQ than you but that doesn’t mean they are smarter so both
people are able to be successful.
Connection to
success
 Relating this to the world/life high class business such as the
corporate world looks more at how much experience one has but
what plays a big role is how many degrees you have graduated
with from college. It relates to Galdwells idea because you don’t
have to have a great education and degrees to be able to get a
good job and be successful.
 Kim’s Brother is a perfect example for this because he has an
internship in the city and he is going for his real estate license in
the city. He hasn’t graduated college yet but he has already
become very successful with sales he has already made and the
profit he has made which shows you don’t necessarily need a great
college education and it doesn’t matter what college you go to,
the name of the college doesn’t mean anything when it comes to
education today although might some feel the opposite way, one
can become successful either way.