How well do you know the world: global health issues, history, infant mortality rates and carbon emissions? You probably think you know more than a chimpanzee, right? Wrong. According to the work of Swedish professor Hans Rosling, you probably know less about global health issues than a chimpanzee that's only guessing the answers.
If you don't believe me, just give this testing app on Facebook a whirl. It starts out with a taunting video from Rosling challenging you to take his quiz and see if you know as much as about global issues as a chimpanzee.
The quiz asks about births per woman and child survival rates in different countries around the world. You might know more than me, but I only got three out of eight questions right. The virtual chimpanzee got five right, just by going with the option that I didn't choose.
The test app is just one of the creative ways that Rosling has been trying to demonstrate his point that we are woefully misinformed about a whole variety of important global issues.
It started four years ago with an electrifying talk Rosling gave at TED, which I've embedded below:
Ever since then, he has been working with a group called Gapminder, whose goal is "fighting the most devastating myths by building a fact-based world view that everyone understands," according to its website.
It does that goal by taking a subject we usually consider pretty boring, statistics, and transforms it into visually mesmerizing (and sometimes frightening graphics).
There are plenty examples of that all over Gapminder's website, like the interactive presentation that tracks the growth of carbon emissions since 1820, or another one that tracks the HIV epidemic over the last 30 years.
Do you think this is an effective way to communicate tough ideas like global warming and poverty? Let us know in the comments section.
Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/Corbis
Tags: History
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