The ‘Easy’ 1% Club Question That Left 75% of Contestants Stumped

A question on ITV’s The 1% Club looked like a straightforward maths problem, but it caught out three-quarters of the contestants.

The show, hosted by comedian Lee Mack, challenges players to rely on logic and common sense rather than general knowledge. As the questions become progressively harder, contestants compete for a share of the £100,000 cash prize.

One recent question, however, proved that even an apparently simple task can become surprisingly difficult when you rush your answer.

Can you solve it in 30 seconds?

Contestants were shown three different shapes, labelled A, B and C, and asked:

Which square has the biggest total area?

They had just 30 seconds to choose their answer.

At first glance, it certainly looked like the kind of question that might require some basic geometry. The shapes were accompanied by numbers, making it easy to assume that contestants needed to calculate the area of each one.

Others might simply have looked at the three options and picked B because it appeared to be the largest.

But both approaches would lead you in the wrong direction.

The trick was in the wording

The question did not actually require any calculations.

Instead, contestants needed to pay close attention to exactly what was being asked.

The key word was square.

Although three shapes were shown, only one of them was actually a square. The other two were rectangles.

That meant A was the correct answer, regardless of which shape appeared to have the greatest overall size.

The question was therefore testing attention to detail rather than mathematical ability. Anyone who immediately focused on the dimensions or simply chose the shape that looked largest could easily miss the point.

Viewers admitted they fell for it too

The question also caught some viewers off guard.

One person admitted on social media that they had initially chosen B before going back and reading the question again.

Another viewer wrote: “I’m [not going to lie] at first instinct I got it wrong too, then I saw the question again.”

The response to the puzzle highlights one of the traps behind questions on The 1% Club: sometimes the hardest part is resisting the urge to answer immediately.

In this case, taking a few extra seconds to read the wording carefully was enough to reveal that the apparent maths problem had nothing to do with calculating areas at all.