Vancouver Sun

Two-year-old girl in diapers accepted into Mensa

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She's almost three — but not quite — and has far more brain power than most adults.

Little Kashe Quest of Los Angeles has an IQ of 146. The average American registers at 100.

Quest has been accepted into Mensa, the organizati­on for those with very high intelligen­ce quotients.

“We started to notice her memory was really great. She just picked up things really fast and she was really interested in learning,” Quest's mother, Sukhjit Athwal, told Fox11 of Los Angeles. “At about 17, 18 months, she had recognized all the alphabet, numbers, colours and shapes.”

She is now American Mensa's youngest member.

Though she can barely pronounce them, the toddler can name the 50 states by shape and location on a map (practising with flash cards while fiddling on the floor in her diaper), and she's learning Spanish and sign language, can count to 100, knows the periodic table of elements by their symbols — and is learning to read.

Her mother, an educator, couldn't find a preschool teaching at Quest's level, so she opened one for advanced youngsters, which Quest attends.

She may be miles ahead of her age group, but Quest's mom and dad don't want her to be different from other kids. “It's different because the way we communicat­e with her,” Athwol told Fox11. “It has to be different because she's able to understand just a little bit more.”

Though Quest is asked to name the three branches of government, it's not all academic around the house. Athwal says “she's in that toddler stage. So she very much is still a normal two-year-old where we have negotiatio­ns, we have tantrums.”

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