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Buckway competes against nation for highest IQ score

Einstein’s IQ score was said to be 160.How will Whitehorse mayor Bev Buckway measure up?Buckway will compete alongside 35 other mayors from…
031407-bevbuckway

Einstein’s IQ score was said to be 160.

How will Whitehorse mayor Bev Buckway measure up?

Buckway will compete alongside 35 other mayors from across the country on CBC television’s Test the Nation: IQ.

The mayors are competing against a celebrity panel and four other teams made up of professionals, such as surgeons, millionaires, tattoo artists, radio DJs and fitness instructors.

The celebrity panel will include Miss Universe Canada, The Designer Guys — Steven Sabados and Chris Hyndman — Royal Canadian Airfarce’s Jessica Holmes, comedian and actor Shaun Majumder and Little Mosque on the Prairie’s Zaib Shaikh.

The two-hour program will air Sunday, March 18 at 8 p.m. on CBC.

Each team will answer multiple-choice standard IQ questions, using a remote device to select answers A, B, C, or D.

The IQ of each group will be averaged at the end of the broadcast and the winning team will be awarded the Test the Nation: IQ trophy.

Buckway was asked to participate in the television show shortly after she was elected as mayor in October.

It will be a really good opportunity to meet the other mayors and do some promotion for the Yukon, said Buckway.

She will be travelling to Toronto Friday March 16, armed with Whitehorse pins and other information.

“It will be one of those fun things that you get to do sometimes when you’re an elected person,” said Buckway.

 “I was really delighted to be chosen and the exciting thing is that with the Canada Winter Games, the mayor of Iqualuit and mayor of PEI were here, so I’ve already met them.

“I’m a CBC fan from way back and I just viewed it as one of those neat opportunities that come along and I shouldn’t give it up and give it to somebody else in the country.”

The test was developed for CBC by a team of psychologists at Trent University.

“What they promise us is, it’s an IQ test via groups so they’ll give the group scores, not the individual scores,” said Buckway.

“The only score that they’ll actually announce is if an individual has the highest score in the group, that’s the one that will come out.”

The show will be hosted by CBC’s Wendy Mesley and Brent Bambury.

Programs like this one, that challenge perceptions and intelligence, have been hits in 40 countries.

Some of the questions to be answered are:

• Are brunettes really smarter than blondes?

• Are left-handed people brighter than right-handed people?

• Can vegetarians beat meat eaters?

Results from around the world have been hotly debated.

In Australia, shorter people scored lower than their taller counterparts, and in every other Test the Nation: IQ men have scored higher than women.

Will Canadians

buck the trend?

Buckway took the practice test at www.cbc.ca/testthenation and scored 80 per cent, answering eight out of 10 questions correctly.

“There was some math and then they give you a list of words and then they show you another list and ask you which word wasn’t on there, that kind of thing,” said Buckway about the practice test.

“Some of the memory might be OK for me; hopefully some of the logic will be, math maybe not so good depending on how detailed they get.”

The test masters give you about 10 seconds to memorize things before moving on to the next question, said Buckway.

“What they won’t be asking are questions that you can only answer if you’re in a (special) profession or anything like that so they’ll show you groups of figures and say, ‘OK, which one’s missing’,” she said.

“It’s pretty hard to cram for it because you don’t know what they’re going to throw at you.”

A CBC release gave some interesting IQ tips.

For example, regularly playing puzzle games has shown to increase one’s IQ, according to a study.

Buckway has recently taken up playing Sudoku, a Japanese number game that can be found in most newspapers.

Researchers have also found that with each year of post-secondary schooling your IQ raises 3.5 points.

Buckway completed high school at FH Collins and then went on to receive a diploma with honours in agriculture.

She also has a tradesman ticket as a barber and a certificate in non-profit management from the Canadian Centre of Philanthropy.

The CBC release also notes that while drinking caffeine can’t improve your IQ, it does make you more alert and increases short-term memory.

“I don’t mind a cup of hot chocolate in the mornings and I’ve been known to drink a can of Coke, but I’m not a coffee and tea drinker … I guess I’ll have to have more chocolate,” said Buckway.

Because she is on the mayors’ team, Buckway said she is confident she will do well, although she also said she doesn’t believe there will be a huge discrepancy between all the teams’ IQ scores.

“I’m going to say that we’re all probably fairly matched because out of each group of 36 there are going to be very diverse people that make up that group, so I would be surprised if any one group (and I might be totally wrong) was way ahead.

“I think that some of the scores would be fairly similar on that,” she said.