• Four-year-old Teddy Hobbs becomes UK's youngest Mensa member

    OffBeat
    Four-year-old Teddy Hobbs becomes UK's youngest Mensa member
    Teddy learned to read at the age of two while watching television and playing on his tablet, without his parents' knowledge...

    Digital Desk: Teddy Hobbs, a four-year-old boy from Portishead, Somerset, who can read and count in seven languages, has joined Britain's Mensa, according to the BBC. 

    Mensa is the world's largest and oldest high-IQ society, accepting members who score in the 98th percentile or higher on an approved intelligence test. 



    Teddy learned himself to read at the age of two while watching television and playing on his tablet, without his parents' knowledge. Teddy learnt to read at the age of 26 months, according to his mother, by watching children's television and mimicking the sounds of letters. Following that, the little genius learned how to count up to 100 in Mandarin.

    He can also count to 100 in languages other than his native Welsh, French, Spanish, and German. The child is uninterested in games and television and prefers to unwind with a word search. 



    "We made sure he had enough of books because he has always been interested in them. During the lockdown, however, he developed a genuine interest, and by the age of 26 months, he had taught himself to read. He then moved on to numbers and was studying his multiplication tables. The following Christmas, we gave him a tablet to play games on. Instead, he learned himself to count in Mandarin up to 100 "SomersetLive spoke with Beth Hobbs.

    "He was playing on his tablet, making these sounds that I couldn't place, and I asked him what it was, and he responded, 'Mummy, I'm counting in Mandarin,'" she added. 

    His parents, astounded and perplexed by his abilities, contacted health visitors and requested that they evaluate him. Teddy, who was three years and seven months old at the time, had to go through an hour-long online evaluation with professionals.



    He was welcomed to Mensa late last year after scoring 139 out of 160 on the Stanford Binet test, putting him in the 99.5th percentile for his age. Further evaluations found that Teddy, at the age of three years and eight months, had the letter and word recognition of a kid who was eight years and ten months old. 

    The young kid, who begins school in September, received a diploma verifying his membership in Mensa, making him one of the country's youngest members.