LONDON: A Pakistani girl living in the UK passed 17 GCSEs last week after passing another 17 the previous year with flying colors.
Mahnoor Cheema, 16, originally from Lahore, scored 9s and a handful of 8s in her GCSEs in subjects ranging from astronomy and further maths to Latin and French. Grade 9 is the equivalent of above an A* and grade 8 is the equivalent of between grades A* and A.
The teenager wants to study medicine at the University of Oxford and has an IQ of 161, The Times reported.
Cheema’s favorite subjects are science and English literature and she has a particular fondness for the works of Homer. She speaks English, Urdu and Punjabi fluently, and can also speak decent French and German.
The teenager spends up to five hours a day reading when not in school, plays the cello, swims, rides horses and plays chess. She has posters of Harry Potter actress Emma Watson and Nobel prize-winning activist Malala Yousafzai in her bedroom.
She says that she doesn’t particularly “love” school and prefers learning by reading. “I’m not the type to sit in a classroom and absorb knowledge from somebody who’s giving a lecture,” she said.
Cheema’s father, Usman, is a barrister, and her mother, Tayyaba, is studying for a masters in economics. They moved to the UK from Lahore in 2016.
The teenager said that she felt “isolated” when she first arrived in the UK at the age of nine because her teachers would “just put me to the side and give me a bunch of maths problems to do because I was already very familiar with what the rest of the class was doing.”
Her father said that his daughter’s extraordinary results did not come as a surprise: “We were expecting this news if I tell you honestly — she never lets us down.”
He said that he knew she was “not normal” from when she was just 10 months old, as she was already formulating long sentences.
One of her earliest childhood memories is reading Harry Potter in the playground at her primary school in Pakistan at the age of six while other children played.
Cheema and her family will be celebrating her achievements with a barbecue attended by her extended family and her two younger siblings, Laila, 13, and Jibran, 8.
