Ten-year-old Valerith Ortega carefully reads each question as she adjusts herself in the chair. She is a finalist in a test to identify gifted children in Venezuela — a significant challenge for the collapsed educational system. "They give us tasks that are very easy for us and always take us out of the classroom and bring us to a more advanced one to teach us that content," she says after taking the final test of the Recreational Language Olympiad along with 198 other students across the country. There are no official figures, but it is estimated that 2% of the population in each country is gifted (IQ over 130), and another 15% is exceptional (IQ over 115) in a specific area. Given that Venezuela has about 7 million school-aged children, it is estimated that there are around 160,000 gifted individuals in the country. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES ARRANGED IN SEQUENCES