Five-year-old US boy youngest member of IQ society Mensa

Updated on: Saturday, April 27, 2013

A five-year-old US boy with an IQ of 147 has become one of the youngest members admitted to the exclusive high IQ society Mensa.

A kindergartner, Gus Dorman from Illinois is already reading novels such as Charlotte's Web, while his classmates are still working on mastering the English alphabet.

Gus memorises the periodic table and a world map for fun. And sometimes he corrects his father on geography, ABC News reported.

"He got into an argument with me because I told him that the capital of Alaska is Anchorage," said Dorman.

Gus started to bring a newspaper to read on the toilet when he was just 18 months old, and he was also reading his father's copies of Wired magazine, Dorman said.

Since Gus was the couple's first child, Dorman and his wife, Kotomi, simply thought this was how all kids acted.

"We didn't realise he was gifted. We just thought he was like all kids," said Dorman.

Dorman decided it was time to take his son to get an IQ test, hoping that he might qualify for an out-of-state gifted program.

Gus scored within the 99th percentile in nearly all categories of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, which qualified him for Mensa, whose members must have an IQ of at least 135.

In spite of his high IQ, his father said Gus had problems when he started school. Gus would get restless when it came to learning addition or the alphabet.

Gus was already on multiplication and long division before he started going to school, according to Dorman.

Five-year-old US boy youngest member of IQ society Mensa

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