People have been left scratching their heads as they struggle to work out a quiz question that only 1% of people can solve – but some say the answer is ‘so obvious’
You could consider yourself in the top 1% of brainy people if you can work out this tricky quiz question that has been leaving most quizzers completely stumped.
Keeping your brain active is just as important as exercising the rest of your body, and one of the best ways to do that is by challenging yourself to complete brainteasers and other puzzles. These short brain exercises can boost cognitive function and can even help keep degenerative diseases such as dementia at bay. Not to mention the thrill you get when you finally work out the answer to a particularly tricky one.
But you’ll need more than just your average brain power to work out this fiendishly difficult question. It was posed to the contestants on the ITV gameshow The 1% Club, in which the questions get increasingly harder based on how many people, on average, can get the answer right.
The show’s questions start off easy, with ones that 90% of people can solve, and go all the way down to the dreaded 1% question that’s deemed so difficult that 99% of people fail to get it right.
In a clip of one episode of the show shared on TikTok, host Lee Mack shared a 1% question with the contestants, which read: “Which commonly used word can go in front of these words to make three new words? SING, BAG, RING.”
The question asks contestants to find one word that can go in front of sing, bag, and ring to form three distinct new words. However, we don’t know how many letters the word is, and all we know is that it’s a “common” word.
Do you think you’ve got the answer? It left people in the TikTok comments absolutely stumped, so don’t feel bad if you can’t work it out right away. After all, it’s supposed to stump 99% of people.
If you want a hint, maybe try starting with all the words you can think of that form a new word when added to “bag”. You might first think of a handbag, but there’s no such word as “handsing” or “handring”, so that’s not right.
Keep going, and you might stumble across the answer – although one sneaky thing is likely to trip you up as you’ll need to change how one of the words is pronounced.
We’re going to tell you what the real answer is now, so if you’re still working it out, don’t scroll any further!
Answer
The correct answer is “tea”, which makes the words teasing, teabag, and tearing. It’s mostly the word “tearing” that stumps people, as many in the comments were left asking, “What is a tea ring?” before realising what the word actually is.
Several people on TikTok were so confused by the question that they started making words out of the options already supplied. One person was convinced the answer was “bag” because they could make the words “handbag, airbag, and dirtbag” – even though that’s not at all what the question was asking.
Someone said: “I don’t even understand the question let alone know the answer.” Another added: “Is tea even a commonly used word?”
Did you get the answer right? Let us know in the comments!
