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What's an IQ? (Intelligence Quotient)What is the highest IQ?Who is the smartest person?How did the IQ start?Does the IQ really measure intelligence?Take an I.Q test? |
IQ is a number meant to measure people cognitive abilities (intelligence) in relation to their age group. An I.Q between 90 and 110 is considered average; over 120, superior.
Roughly 68% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115. The average range between 70 and 130, and represents about 95% of the population. A score below 70 may indicate problems in understanding the iQ questions or soem type or retardation, and a score above 130 may indicate intellectual giftedness. 1% of the population has an IQ of 136 or higher. However, an individual scoring 100 within one population can score above or below that value within another population, for example, the Japanese are supposed to have the highest average IQ in the world (115), but this 115 can only be an average of 100 within their own population.
The highest IQ was 228, according to Guinness Book of Records, this score belongs to the 'smartest' person in the world Marilyn vos Savant who scored it when she was 10 year old. This would, according to recent research, correspond to about IQ 185 at adult age. That score is, at least, surpassed by the chess player and champion Bobby Fisher which was 187, and Kim Ung-Yong (S. Korea) with a score over 200.
I don't think anyone has an accurate answer to that question; however some psychologists believe that William James Sidis reached the maximum capacity possible for a human. In the Buzan's Book of Mental World Records, the highest IQ score ever attained is assigned to the history's greatest genius Leonardo Da Vinci. The estimate is a nearly unbelievable adult IQ of 220.
It all started with the Binet scale with one single goal in mind, to serve as a guide to identify children in the school who need special education to minimize their inferior level. Binet also reported that it's not designed to measure 'intelligence'. Later after many modifications on the original method of Binet such as Simon-Binet, or Stanford-Binet, Intelligence tests were getting more popular among the population as well as in government departments. In 1989 the American Academy for the Advancement of Science listed the IQ test among the twenty most significant scientific discoveries of the twentieth century along with nuclear fission, DNA, and flight.
Well, to answer that we first need to answer one question, what is intelligence? You cannot measure something that you can hardly define. The problem is that the term intelligence has never been defined adequately and therefore nobody knows what an IQ test is supposed to measure. In spite of all this, today the future of thousands of children/ employees is determined by the results of this test, simply because it has its good share of accuracy.
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