Activity: Global conditions

Let’s see what score you can get on this quick activity:

If people had no idea what the answers were and guessed at random, the average score would be 3. So isn’t it remarkable that even though they are really important questions, relate to issues that we care about, and don’t require any specialist knowledge, when I do this with my students the median score is 2, and the most common score is just 1?!!

If you take the quiz again, try to guess which is the only question that most people get right. You might notice something interesting – typically, it is the only indicator that got worse. It seems that we’re geared towards noticing and emphasising bad news, and from an evolutionary perspective this makes sense. But just because constant, moderate progress isn’t newsworthy doesn’t mean we should neglect it!

Most of the world is better off than you think: