Viewers of ITV quiz show The 1% Club were left scratching their heads recently after host Lee Mack shared a question that 99% fail to answer – but some say it was ‘too easy’

You’ll need to be a certified genius to answer this quiz question correctly. If you love testing your brains against the rest of the country, then chances are you’re an avid quiz show watcher.

British TV is full of game shows that test your general knowledge skills and help give your brain a workout, but one of the most popular ones on telly these days is The 1% Club, which is hosted by Lee Mack and airs on ITV. The show sees contestants answer a series of questions which get increasingly harder as the game goes on, with the difficulty determined by the percentage of people who should be able to get the answer right.

They begin with brainteasers that 90% of people should be able to answer, before finishing on the titular 1% question that only top brains can solve.

A clip from a previous episode of the show was recently shared on social media, 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 S ELL I N G FR ES H SAL MO N .”

@1percentclubitv Drop your thoughts 👇 #The1PercentClub #quiztime #quiztok ♬ original sound – The 1% Club

Contestants on the show only have 30 seconds to lock in their answer, and 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”.