I took on Britain’s brainiest kid at The Sun Puzzle Page – now try his Only Connect-style challenge
IT’S eyes down for the battle of the brains.
In one corner we have me — Sun Features writer Tom, 23, from Bournemouth, who got a Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree from Oxford University.
My opponent? Krish Arora, a ten-year old from Hounslow, West London, with an IQ of 162 — higher than either pipe-puffing relativity boffin Albert Einstein or physics genius Stephen Hawking.
We told this week how Krish has joined brainiacs circle Mensa after dazzling in tests.
But forget all that. I threw down a REAL challenge — to go head to head with me on some of the toughest puzzles in The Sun.
Before we get down to business, a bit more about the young upstart.
Well, he has won a place next year at the country’s No1 grammar school, Queen Elizabeth’s in Barnet, North London, after blowing the doors off his 11-plus exams.
In maths, he only went and got 100 per cent — telling me he knocked off 60 questions in just 50 minutes, with a quarter of an hour left to twiddle his thumbs.
But far more than just a human calculator, he is also whipping up a storm on the piano — with a Grade Seven distinction to his name and the maximum Grade Eight exam booked in the diary for March.
In his spare time, he also enjoys chess and turns teacher to tutor fellow pupils.
Mum Mauli, 50, an IT boss, and dad Nischal, 52, a property manager, first looked up from their cornflakes when he started reading fluently at age four — and things only got crazier from there.
Mauli says: “Krish is like a sponge — he takes in everything. He excels at absolutely everything he does.”
But what about me? I mean I too have done tutoring, and once volunteered as a teaching assistant at my local primary school.
So how would pint-sized Krish find it trying to cut me down to size. Sadly, it was crushingly easy.
We began with a puzzle of his choosing — surprise, surprise, the Numbercrunch.
It has three levels — Easy, Medium and Harder — each involving a series of nine calculations.
On the first, I’d got a third of the way through by the time he had finished. On the next challenge, I had completed only two sums.
And with the final test, I had done just one, wrongly, while Kris was already finishing up.
As we tried our next puzzle, the Suguru, Kris breezed through while I had to ask him for help.
We then tackled the Sakuro and Sun Doku and I fared no better.
So much for my Oxford degree, I had been given the third degree by a lad not yet out of primary class.
Kris said: “I feel very privileged to be so clever. I really enjoyed The Sun’s puzzles. I’d never tried them before and now I’m a fan.”
He also revealed he likes making his own puzzles, in the style of BBC quiz show Only Connect, presented by Victoria Coren Mitchell.
So if you dare, here are two them for you to try, with answers below.
Answers
EASY: Rainbow, lightning, rain, snow – things caused by weather; Enter, tab, control, space – buttons on a keyboard; Graph, mobile, focus, cross – auto___; 7, jade, wishbone, horseshoe – symbols of luck.
HARD: Moon, comb, sweet, suckle – honey___ ; Bee, queue, sea, are – words that sound like letters; Drawer, stressed, diva, mood – words that make new words spelt backward; Bananas, nuts, cuckoo, demented – synonyms for crazy.