Can you beat a chimpanzee?
Twelve questions about the world, each with three answers. A chimp picking bananas marked A, B and C would get about four right by pure luck. When Gapminder asked 12,000 people in 14 countries similar questions in 2017, the average was two. Nobel laureates and medical researchers did no better.
Why we get it wrong
People don't miss these questions at random. Almost everyone misses them the same way, guessing the world is poorer, sicker and more dangerous than it is. Hans Rosling traced this to ten instincts that once kept us alive and now mislead us.
The quiz format and the ten instincts come from Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World, and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund (2018). The questions here are rewritten with the latest data, so some answers differ from the book. One was swapped out, and one answer has changed since 2018 (see question 6). Try Gapminder's own version at upgrader.gapminder.org.