8 Genius

CHAPTER 1 Are You a Genius? HERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS. SEE IF YOU CAN ANSWER THEM. 1. Some months have 31 days. How many months have 28 days? 2. There are 3 apples. You take 2 away. How many do you have? 3. It rains at 11 a.m. in London. Can it be sunny 36 hours later? 4. Mary's father has five daughters: Nana, Nene, Nini, and Nono. What is the name of the other daughter? 5. How many times can you take away 5 from 25? 6. Can you make one word from the letters in "new door"? 7. You are driving a bus with 43 people in New York. You stop the bus. 7 people get on and 2 leave. At the next stop, 8 leave the bus and 4 get on. At the next stop, 3 people get on and 5 leave. What is the name of the driver? 8. A town is three kilometers long. How far can you walk into it? But these questions are only for fun. What does a real intelligence test ask you? Look at the next chapter.

CHAPTER 2 What Is a Genius? HOW DO WE TEST INTELLIGENCE? Intelligence tests began in the early 1900s. When you do a test, you get a score. Put a lot of scores together and they look like the picture above. As you can see, a lot of people get a score of about 100. Very few people get a score above 145. Some of these people are geniuses. What kinds of geniuses? Well, some of them write good music or books. Some are painters. Others have new ideas in science and are inventors. Questions like these can tell us how intelligent people are. See if you can answer them. The questions are testing different things. Some use numbers, some use letters, and others use pictures. This is because people have different kinds of intelligence.

Genuises have a different kind of intelligence from other people. Sometimes they do unusual things. Michelangelo (1475—1564) was a great painter and sculptor. He slept in his clothes, with his shoes on. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770—1827) was a musician. He was deaf later in his life. He couldn't hear, but he wrote more great music. Albert Einstein (1879—1955) was a great scientist. He had many important new ideas, but he never remembered his phone number. Also, he didn't wear socks. Not all geniuses are men. Marie Curie (1867—1934) was the most important scientist ever. Einstein said she made his work possible. She discovered radium, but she often forgot to eat. Sometimes in the past, women did important work, but nobody knew about it. In 1952 in King's College, London, Rosalind Franklin took pictures of DNA. DNA is something in our bodies. It is why we look like our parents. James Watson and Francis Crick discovered what DNA looks like at Cambridge University in 1953. But they used Rosalind Franklin's photograph and some of her ideas in their work. In 1962, Watson and Crick got the Nobel Prize. Rosalind Franklin died four years earlier, at the age of 37. She did not get the Nobel Prize.

CHAPTER 3 Savants PEOPLE CALL STEPHEN WILTSHIRE "THE LIVING CAMERA." Look at this picture of New York. Stephen Wiltshire drew it. He flew above the city in a helicopter, then worked on the picture for five days. Stephen comes from London. He didn't speak his first words until he was five— then he said "pencil" and "paper." Stephen is a savant. There are not many of them in the world. Savants can do some things very well, but other things are difficult for them. Often they don't talk to people very much. Rex Lewis-Clack can't see, and he doesn't speak very well. When he was very young, he listened to music. He got a small piano for his second birthday. After that day, he played and played. At age eight he played for money. He can hear a piece of music once and play it. Now he plays the piano in many countries, but he needs help to get dressed every day.

Kim Peek didn't walk until the age of four. All his life he had problems doing things with his hands. And he didn't get high scores on IQ tests. But Kim read books very quickly. He read a lot (more than 12,000 books in his life) and remembered everything in them. In 1984, the movie writer Barry Morrow met Kim. Then he wrote the movie Rain Man. In the movie, Dustin Hoffman is a savant, Raymond Babbit. He can remember things very well, and makes a lot of money playing card games. The movie helped Kim. Thanks to Rain Man, Kim got to meet people. He enjoyed telling them the day of the week they were born and what was in the newspaper that day. Sometimes people change later in life. Dr. Anne Adams was a teacher at a college, but at age 46 she stopped doing her job and started painting pictures every day. Why did she do this? Because something in her brain changed. It wasn't easy for her to speak or to remember things. But at the same time, another part of her brain worked in a new way. Her paintings took the place of words. She spoke through her paintings. Anne died in 2007, but her beautiful paintings are with us today.

CHAPTER 4 Child Prodigies YOU CAN BE A PRODIGY IN SCIENCE, MATH, LANGUAGES ALMOST ANYTHING! For part of their summer, some special young people take a course at the Center for Talented Youth (CTY). CTY is like a school for very intelligent young people. It tests children in many parts of the United States. The very intelligent ones come for courses that are three weeks long. These children can understand more than others and they like different things. Maybe they read more difficult books, watch different movies, and like to talk about lots of things. At CTY they can find other children with the same ideas and make friends. They learn that they are not so different, not so unusual. Alma Deutscher, from England, is a prodigy in music. Some people call her the new Mozart. At age two she read music for the piano, and at age three she played the violin. She plays both the violin and piano beautifully. And she started writing music at age six. But is she going to be a really great musician and composer one day? It's possible. Later in their lives, some prodigies are the best in the world. But others don't get better.