Viewers of the ITV game show The 1% Club were left baffled by a recent question that it’s claimed 99% of people can’t answer correctly – but some insisted it was ‘too easy’
This quiz question shared in a recent episode of the ITV game show The 1% club is said to be so difficult that a whopping 99% of people can’t answer it correctly. Do you think you’ve got what it takes to solve it?
Hosted by Lee Mack, The 1% Club sees contestants answer a series of questions which get increasingly harder as the game goes on. They begin with brainteasers that 90% of people are expected to get right, and slowly drop down the percentages until they arrive at the fiendishly difficult 1% question, which must be answered correctly in order to win the jackpot.
A clip from a recent episode of the show was shared on TikTok and showed contestants attempting to solve the final question – a tricky puzzle that is aimed at the top 1% of the population.
The question was: “If you remove all the underlined letters from the sentence below, what word can be spelt if you rearrange all of the remaining letters?
“ONE SELLING FRESH SALMON.”
Contestants on the show only have 30 seconds to lock in their answer, and they cannot make notes, such as writing down what letters are left after removing the underlined ones.
If you want to really consider yourself brainy enough to solve the 1% question, then you’ll need to do the working out entirely in your head too – though we wouldn’t blame you for using a pen and paper!
Are you struggling to work out the answer? Let us give you a hint: the four-word sentence is another clue in itself. Think carefully about what “one selling fresh salmon” might mean, and you’ll arrive at the answer.
Don’t scroll down any further before you’ve come to a conclusion on what you think the answer might be. We’re about to tell you the solution, so check if you were right down below.
Answer
If you remove all the underlined letters, you’re left with: “ONESIGFRHM.”
That doesn’t mean anything as it is, but you should be able to work out the anagram now. If you keep the initial clue, “one selling fresh salmon”, in mind as you look at the letters, you should arrive at one solution: Fishmonger.
Commenters on the TikTok video were divided on the question. While some admitted it was “impossible” for them to solve, others argued it was “so easy”, especially for a question deemed too tough for 99% of people.
One person said: “This is impossible.” Another added: “Couldn’t figure it out, went to the comments for the answer. Didn’t even see the four words staring me in the face as a clue.”
However, someone else stated: “It’s easy if you read the clue in the sentence.”
There were also several people in the comments who didn’t quite understand what they were supposed to be doing. Some were slightly incorrect by entering “fisherman” as the answer, while others missed the mark completely, suggesting answers such as “freshing”, “aloneness”, and “reformings”.