Two contestants risked their guaranteed money for a shot at the jackpot – only for four seemingly unrelated words to bring the game to a brutal end

Four words.

No equation. No obscure trivia. Not even a particularly complicated instruction.

Yet this deceptively simple-looking puzzle was enough to stop The 1% Club from giving away its enormous £99,000 jackpot.

And if you fancy finding out whether you would have done any better, there’s a very simple way to play along.

Give yourself 30 seconds.

But don’t scroll down to the answer until you’ve made your guess.

£99,000 came down to four words

Three contestants – Victoria, Phil and Anne – had survived all the way to the end of the ITV game show.

At that point, they faced the decision that makes The 1% Club’s finale particularly unforgiving.

They could take the safer option or risk it for a much bigger payday.

Victoria decided she’d gone far enough and took her share of the guaranteed £10,000.

Phil and Anne went the other way.

They gambled.

That meant the pair had a chance of walking away with the £99,000 jackpot if they could solve the final 1% question.

Then Lee Mack revealed the puzzle.

It read:

“All the words in this list have something specific in common. What is it?”

Underneath were just four words:

INTO

THEREFORE

EVALUATE

BENIGN

That’s it.

So, what do they all have in common?

Your 30 seconds starts now.

The obvious approach might send you in completely the wrong direction

Looking at the words, your first instinct is probably to start pulling them apart.

Maybe they contain smaller words.

Perhaps there’s a hidden name.

Maybe certain letters appear in particular positions.

That’s more or less where the contestants’ minds went too.

Anne answered that the four words had names hidden inside them.

Phil had been looking at the possibility that each contained two words, although benign caused problems for his theory.

Neither had found what the question was actually looking for.

And that meant neither contestant took home the £99,000 jackpot.

But before revealing the answer, have one more attempt.

There’s a clue that makes this considerably easier:

Stop looking at the words.

Try saying them instead.

 

@1percentclubitv The final 1% question 🏆 Conment your answer below 👇 #The1PercentClub will be back in 3 days on #ITV 1 and @WeAreSTV. Straight after #BGT or catch up on @ITVX ! #quiz #Saturdaynight #LeeMack #TV #funny #meme #Saturday #quiztok #win #1 ♬ original sound – The 1% Club

The answer becomes painfully obvious once you hear it

The trick is hidden at the end of each word.

Say them aloud:

Into.

Therefore.

Evaluate.

Benign.

Now listen to those endings again:

TWO.

FOUR.

EIGHT.

NINE.

Every word ends with the sound of a number.

INTO → TWO

THEREFORE → FOUR

EVALUATE → EIGHT

BENIGN → NINE

And suddenly four completely unrelated words have an incredibly simple connection.

No specialist knowledge was required.

There wasn’t a complicated mathematical sequence to calculate.

You didn’t even need to find numbers written inside the words.

You needed to stop concentrating on how they were spelled and notice how their endings sounded.

That’s also what makes the question particularly nasty under The 1% Club’s 30-second time pressure.

The words are sitting directly in front of you, so your eyes naturally take over. You start examining letters, looking for hidden words and searching for visual patterns.

But the solution isn’t really visual at all.

By the time you realise you should be listening rather than looking, your 30 seconds might already be disappearing.

For Phil and Anne, that realisation didn’t arrive in time.

Victoria had already secured her share of the £10,000.

The other two had taken their shot at £99,000.

Four ordinary words were enough to make sure neither of them got it.