Summary

Chapter 3 is called "The Trouble with Genius, Part 1" Gladwell begins with a description of Chris Langan, a man who has possibly the highest IQ of anyone alive. He describes Langan's appearance on a television quiz show, as well as the remarkable intelligence he displays at a very young age. Gladwell leaves the discussion of Langan to return to his story later.

Gladwell turns to the subject of IQ, which is short for "intelligence quotient." A standard IQ test called the Stanford-Binet test is developed by Professor Lewis Terman at Stanford University. Terman performs a remarkable experiment beginning in the 1920s, in which he sifts through school records to find a group of children with very high IQ scores, whom he then tracks through their school career and into their adult life. He measures their success. He expects that...