The FP Quiz

Are you a globalization junkie? Test your knowledge of global trends, economics, and politics with 8 questions about how the world works.

FP Quiz Answers

1) C, 19 percent. About 1 in 5 Iraqis, some 5.2 million people, are displaced from their homes. About 2.4 million live as refugees outside Iraq, mainly in neighboring countries such as Jordan and Syria. According to the International Organization for Migration, another 2.8 million are internally displaced within Iraq itself. Many return to find their homes destroyed or occupied by others, or they discover they’ve been priced out of their old neighborhoods.

2) C, 24. Of the two dozen countries that are shrinking in population, nine, including Moldova and Russia, are former Soviet states. Most others are Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria and Slovenia. Developed countries Germany and Japan also make the list, as do AIDS-afflicted Swaziland and Zimbabwe. The fastest-growing countries? The Maldives (5.6 percent per year) and the United Arab Emirates (3.8 percent).

3) C, Singapore. The Gaza Strip has frequently been described as one of the most densely populated places on Earth. With 10,800 people per square mile, it is indeed crowded; by comparison, Bangladesh has 2,800 per square mile, and the United States just 80. But there are places far more crowded than Gaza. Singapore squeezes in 17,200 people per square mile, and Hong Kong fits 16,600.

4) B, 25 percent. The European Union gets a quarter of its natural gas from Russia, with 80 percent passing through Ukraine. That’s why Europe gets the shivers whenever Russia has a pricing dispute with Ukraine and shuts off the gas. Fears of being left in the cold have led to proposals for pipelines from Russia that bypass Ukraine, or pipelines that skirt Russia altogether, extending from Central Asian countries to Europe via Turkey.

5) A, Luxembourg. Tiny, wealthy Luxembourg is a country packed with cars—647 per 1,000 people—according to the International Road Federation. The No. 2 and No. 3 countries for car ownership are Iceland and New Zealand, respectively, both of which are wealthy and have sizable rural communities in remote areas. The United States may be the country of Henry Ford, but it actually has fewer cars relative to its population (about 461 per 1,000) than its neighbor to the north, Canada (about 561 per 1,000).

6) C, 95 percent. Nearly all music downloads are illegal and unpaid, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the global recording industry. That amounts to more than 40 billion files illegally downloaded and shared in 2008. In China, one of the world’s leading sources for illegal downloads, the online piracy rate is estimated to be more than 99 percent.

7) B, Rwanda. Last September, Rwanda became the first country ever to have a female-majority parliament, when 45 out of 80 seats became held by women. The historic vote—in a country that was 70 percent female after its 1994 genocide and is 55 percent female now—occurred in part because of a quota: Thirty percent of seats are constitutionally required to go to women. The No. 2 and No. 3 countries for female representation are Sweden (47 percent) and Cuba (43 percent). In the U.S. House of Representatives, women hold just 18 percent of the seats.

8) C, 800 gallons. To grow the food the average person eats each day, plus the crops that are fed to animals that wind up on the dinner table, an astonishing 800 gallons are needed per person, per day, according to the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. Fortunately, technological advances in irrigation have the potential to decrease water waste in agriculture by as much as 70 percent.