are you smarter than a 10 year old?

January is, in my book, a month when you shouldn’t be doing anything more taxing than curling up on the sofa, under a blanket, and watching copious amounts of telly.

But for poor Flea, it’s exam season.

This September, Flea is going to be going up to secondary school. Don’t ask me how that happened, I have no idea. Last time I looked closely, Flea looked like this:

babyflea

Anyway, the schools we’re applying to require the kids to sit an entrance exam, so Flea has spent the last six months or so at school working towards the exam. As a supportive, responsible parent, naturally I’ve been helping her.

Except it turns out that secondary school entrance exams? They’re actually kind of hard. In a random, why-would-you-ever-need-to-know-that sort of way. And an oh-god-I-think-I-used-to-know-that-hang-on-don’t-tell-me sort of way.

Take the questions below for example – all of which (incidentally) I struggled with. And I’m not a stupid person. Well, not entirely stupid, at any rate. They’re the sort of questions that I vaguely sense I do know how to work out – but I don’t really have the patience and my head hurts and can I just go and have a cup of coffee instead, please? Flea had to solve 85 of these questions in 45 minutes for her exam. Can you imagine?

I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Luckily, Flea’s smarter than me and passed the exam. But how would you do?  (I’ve put the answers at the bottom for you to check) 

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q42

Q5

Q6

Q7

Q8

Q9

Q10

 

Tell me how you did in the comments.

Most of these, I think I can work out, given time and a pencil. Although I query whether the answer to Q6 is still a word in common use, and I do believe Q2 is missing a secondary set of brackets, so…

Regardless, only Northern pride is keeping me from marching into school and demanding to know what the freakin’ answer to Q9 is.

 

ANSWERS